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The Essential Nature of Knowledge
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 February 2009
Extract
Prima facie knowledge is an ineradicable monster. Conceived as a relation of a mind to objects extrinsic to it, it is chimerical: for knowledge, as such, is of the real, i.e. of things as they are in se; but the prima facie form of knowledge precludes this. Its object is a thing apprehended ab extra, i.e. as referred to a subject to which it is extrinsic. To seek to escape this impasse either by making the object intrinsic to the subject, or the subject a function of the object, is to reject the prima facie character of knowledge as a relation of compresent terms. The incoherence of prima facie knowledge is that its object must be both extrinsic and intrinsic to mind—extrinsic as independently real, intrinsic as known—yet can be neither: not extrinsic since thus its inseitas is occulted, not intrinsic since thus truth is mere appearance. And this chimaera becomes a monster because knowledge is also ineradicable. We cannot know that knowledge is impossible; and, though we may be in doubt about its extancy, that very doubt is epistemic in form. It is our acceptance of the demands of knowledge that lies at the basis of our doubt; and this applies not only to legitimate doubt about the extancy of knowledge, but also to chimerical doubt about its possibility. Doubt is an inchoation of knowledge, which is thus ineradicable.
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- Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1945
References
page 228 note 1 Man's Place in the Cosmos, p. 122.
page 231 note 1 I am only emphasizing a broad contrast, not suggesting that these are precisely equivalent distinctions.
page 232 note 1 “Neither of these faculties has a preference over the other. Without the sensuous faculty no object would be given us, and without the understanding no object would be thought. Thoughts without content are void; intuitions without conceptions blind…. Knowledge can only arise from the united operation of both….(Nevertheless) we have great reason carefully to… distinguish them” (Kant, Critick of Pure Reason, II, Introd. I).
page 233 note 1 The Life of Dr. Johnson, sub 1763. (Some of the italics are mine.) Cf. this account, e.g. with the emasculated version of Sinclair, W. A. in his recent Introduction to Philosophy, p. 62Google Scholar.
page 233 note 2 In particular it can prove no more than that the stone is as independently real as Dr. Johnson's body. It thus raises a different sort of problem: is the esse of “kicking” percipi?
page 237 note 1 It is thus that its “functional” definition is more purely conceptual than the Euclidean, which is, in part at least, formally perceptual.
page 237 note 2 Critick of Pure Reason, Pt. II, ii, Bk. II, iii, § iv.
page 238 note 1 The inverted commas indicate my realization that “transparency” is an objective character.
page 243 note 1 It is perhaps noteworthy that even Hume was compelled to seek the “reality” of “impressions” in their “force and liveliness”—the nearest approach to action available to “radical objectivism.”