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Appearance and Reality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

John Wisdom
John Wisdom
Affiliation:
Trinity College, Cambridge
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Extract

1. ‘How do we know the material world?’, ‘What is it to know the material world?’, ‘In what ways is knowledge of the material world like and in what ways is it unlike other sorts of knowledge?’

We know how we know the material world and what it is to know the material world and in what ways such knowledge is like and unlike other sorts of knowledge. But a man who knows what poetry is like and how it is like and unlike prose may ask ‘What is poetry?’, and a mathematician who knows what it is like to do mathematics may ask ‘What is mathematics?’ It is in a rather like way that we ask ‘What is knowledge of the material world?’ The ways in which knowledge of the material world is like and unlike other sorts of knowledge are familiar to us but we wish for a still better grasp of these likenesses and unlikenesses.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 52 , Issue 199 , January 1977 , pp. 3 - 11
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1977

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References

1 When in 1967 I read this paper at the University of California at Irvine, Mr Keith Gunderson questioned this statement. His objection was one which may be presented in this way: Is not the question ‘Are Jack's hands above his head?’ a ‘question about the material world’ and nevertheless a question which by its nature is such that Jack is in a position to answer it which no one else could conceivably have been in? It is clear that the statement I made to which Mr Gunderson objects may be mistaken without the rest of my paper being mistaken—as Mr Gunderson himself remarked. But it is also clear that any account of ‘the nature of questions about material things’ will be seriously defective unless it includes a consideration of what Mr Gunderson draws attention to.