Intuitive Knowledge

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Intuitive Knowledge

 

The OED defines “intuition” as “immediate apprehension by the intellect alone” (among other meanings). Intuitive knowledge, then, is knowledge by the intellect alone—knowledge by pure intellection. The senses play no part in it. Empirical knowledge, by contrast, is defined as knowledge by means of the senses, perhaps allowing a contribution by the intellect in addition to sense experience. Intuitive knowledge is often regarded as problematic, even unintelligible, while empirical knowledge is thought to be pellucid and paradigmatic. Thus empiricism has enjoyed ascendancy over rationalism since its inception in the seventeenth century. I will argue that this assessment is mistaken. The subject is large, but I will keep it brief.

            The first point to note is that intuitive knowledge employs a single mental faculty in producing knowledge—the faculty of intellect. Its inputs are intellectual and so are its outputs; it doesn’t go outside itself. However, empirical knowledge employs a pair of faculties of very different nature: intellect in which the knowledge is stored, and the senses that yield sensations. Somehow sensations are supposed to produce states of knowledge. But how can sensations, which are non-propositional, give rise to knowledge, which is propositional? How could sensations constitute knowledge? The two are like chalk and cheese.  Only by attempting to reduce intellect to sensation, which is hopeless. Call this the problem of epistemic mismatch. Second, skepticism stands in the way of basing knowledge of the world on experience, since the two are not logically connected—as with dreams, evil demons, and brains in a vat. Sense experience cannot justify such knowledge claims, so it can hardly be a sound basis for knowledge. Intuitive knowledge has no such problem and is generally regarded as certain (e.g. knowledge of logical laws). There is thus no such thing as empirical knowledge (true justified belief). Third, it is completely unclear what sense experience is such that it can produce knowledge. If we take it to be concept-infused, we impose intellect on sense from outside; if we rigorously exclude concepts from it, the residue will be incapable of creating knowledge (the bare “given”). More basically, it is impossible to say, or discern, what sense experience actually contains: the more you stare at it the more it looks impotent to justify our typical claims about the world. Blooming buzzing confusion can’t yield propositional knowledge of reality. The only way to save empiricism is to inject it with rationalism by invoking intellect. Maybe sensations can somehow trigger knowledge but they can’t act as justifiers of knowledge (“only knowledge can justify knowledge”).

            Here is another way to look at the matter. The senses evolved in collaboration with the motor system to form the sensorimotor system. This system operates to regulate the organism’s relation to its environment and exists independently of cognition. It is not designed to produce knowledge or to interact with the intellect (all animals have it). The empiricist in effect believes that this primitive system can also give rise to propositional knowledge and is indeed its only legitimate basis. But seen from the proper biological perspective, this claim is vastly implausible; the intellectual system might never have evolved while the sensorimotor system would still be doing its job. It would be completely accidental if the senses could perform both functions. Perhaps there is some sort of epistemic hookup between the senses and the intellect, but the idea that knowledge of the world can be exhaustively explained by sensory inputs is quixotic at best. One can certainly imagine a rationalist philosopher (Plato?) holding that no knowledge can be derived from sensation, i.e. sensations can play no justificatory role. This isn’t to say that states of sensory seeming can’t function as justifications, as in “It seems to me that there’s a book on my desk”, but the states so reported are heavily imbued with concepts and capacities drawn from the intellectual faculty; they aren’t simply raw data existing antecedently to the operations of intellect. We really have no clear idea of what empirical knowledge could be construed in the traditional way (“impressions”, “ideas”, “sense-data”, etc.). So as a theory of knowledge, supposedly superior to rationalist theories, empiricist theories are woefully under-described, if not demonstrably incoherent. It is simply not true that knowledge is “based on experience”.

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Ears

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Ears

 

It began over a year ago when a small red patch appeared on the top of my right ear. At first it was diagnosed as inflammation of the cartilage probably brought on by wearing too tight headphones. The cure was not to put any pressure on it and wait for the inflammation to die down. After several months it had increased in size and painfulness, so I returned to the dermatologist. This time a biopsy revealed skin cancer (squamous cell). Now it was necessary to perform surgery. This was duly done: a five-hour MOHs procedure followed by a three-hour reconstruction (local anesthetic). I won’t specify the details but it was all pretty brutal (twenty odd stitches, serious pain). I lost half my ear. The cause: sun damage, possibly a result of playing tennis in the Florida sun.

            At the same time the ear was declared healed a lump appeared in my neck. This was duly scanned and biopsied: it was more cancer. The cancer in my ear had evidently spread to my neck and was now growing apace. A full-scale operation was quickly scheduled. This was performed two weeks ago. Again, I will spare you the gory details except to say that it was an eleven-hour operation requiring a hospital stay and subsequent daily home visits from a nurse. Full recovery is not guaranteed. It is presently difficult to eat and my right shoulder is compromised.

            I relay all this in order to encourage readers to protect their ears from the sun, especially if they live in a place with a lot of it. It is easy to neglect the ears while protecting the face. Sunscreen is not enough, especially if you spend time doing water sports (as I do). Wear a broad-brimmed hat (not a baseball cap). Ideally use a fabric covering such as a skullcap or full-face sun protection balaclava (as I have done for some years). Apparently my experiences are not uncommon and you don’t want to share them.

 

Co

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Blindsight and Empiricism

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Blindsight and Empiricism

 

Imagine a person with blindsight in every sense: no conscious perceptual experience at all but able to receive information subconsciously from the external world. This person nevertheless has ordinary fully conscious reason: she is capable of forming beliefs that count as knowledge in virtue of the informational input. It would not occur to her to suppose that all her knowledge rests on conscious experience; she would not be a traditional empiricist. She might indeed be a rationalist about her powers of knowing, supposing the intellect to be the sole mental faculty implicated in the generation of knowledge (she could still allow that causal relations to the environment are involved). So there is nothing necessary about conscious sensory experience in the production of knowledge of the external world (subliminal perception makes the same point). Sensory qualia are not essential to knowledge of the physical world. On the other hand, the apparatus of reason is essential: concepts, judgment, reasoning, and propositions. You can’t be blind about these things and still know in the ordinary sense. If someone were to claim that sensations of pain and pleasure were the essence of knowledge of physical things, we could quickly refute them by pointing out that a knower could very well lack such sensations and still know, so long as other faculties remained intact—in no way is knowledge based on sensations of pain and pleasure. The same could be said of emotion: it is not essential to the enterprise of knowledge despite its presence in the mind of the typical human knower. Pain, pleasure, and emotion no doubt have a function, but it is clearly not to serve as a foundation for human knowledge. The case of the blindsighted knower shows that the same is true of sensory experience: this too is not the indispensable foundation of human knowledge.[1]

            This suggests that all knowledge conforms to the basic tenets of rationalism: the mental faculty involved in producing knowledge is uniformly reason. It isn’t that some knowledge arises purely from reason and some knowledge consists in a kind of refinement or distillation of sense experience—a different kind of cognitive state—but rather that all knowledge is composed of the same basic materials, though no doubt about different things. Thus mathematical knowledge is essentially the same as knowledge of physical things in its intrinsic nature—viz. an activity of intellect—though the subject matter of the two is different. There is not intellectual knowledge and sensory knowledge, as if the latter is infused with sense experience while the former is not; rather, all knowledge is an affair of the intellect in its inner composition (however differently caused). Moreover, there is no sense in which one type of knowledge mimics or copies sensation; sensation is not internal to any kind of knowledge. There are not two types of knowledge as there are two types of swans (black or white): all knowledge is as the rationalist supposes. Empiricism only seems plausible because we tacitly imbue sensation with the products of the intellect, but this is to presuppose rationalism not find an alternative to it.

            It is quite true that some of our knowledge is about sensation, but that does not imply that this knowledge is itself a form of sensation; it is as intellectual as any knowledge we have. We must not transfer to the medium what belongs to the message, i.e. the subject matter. Our knowledge of sensation (Hume’s “impressions”) is not a version of sensation; it is the application of reason to a certain type of subject matter. Human reason is essentially homogeneous not an amalgam of a sense-based faculty and an intellect-based faculty; and the nature of this faculty corresponds closely to traditional rationalist conceptions from Plato onwards. Simply put, and without any attempt at argumentation, it consists of a set of innate ideas organized by a logical faculty into propositional structures of arbitrary complexity. The rational faculty receives inputs of various kinds, to be sure, but it operates in much the same way across the board. Empiricism is an inadequate theory of the nature of this faculty, and it mistakes the inessential for the essential in the production of knowledge.[2]       

 

[1] See my “Intuitive Knowledge”.

[2] Plato regarded sense experience as incapable of producing genuine knowledge, relegating it to the realm of mere “opinion”; but he could have gone further and rejected it as any kind of justifying basis for our knowledge claims. Experience is just the wrong kind of thing to provide a basis for reason to work on (as I argue in “Intuitive Knowledge”).

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