Truth is deeply connected with communication, with testimony. It is applicable to something that is actually or potentially articulated (including to one’s self – although such private truths, if they are to count as truths, are secondary to public ones) and hence actually or potentially shared. To be shared, it must be articulated, and to be articulated, it must be generalized. My itch may be shared through being registered as an instance of a general type, thus losing its uniqueness, and giving up its location in space and time. Itch qua referent is not located on my (or indeed anyone else’s) body. Speaking of my itch obviously does not spread it from my body to the bodies of those to whom I disclose it. The itch can of course be reconnected with a spatiotemporal location by means of further articulation, as when I speak of “the itch on my forearm that I had yesterday”. The location is not, of course identical with that of the original itch: “my forearm” as a concept is not the same as the forearm attached to my body, any more than “yesterday” is identical with time t1 at which something happened. The itch, however, can now in a virtual sense outlast itself by being available to be referred to indefinitely, located outside of space and time. “That itch I had yesterday” is an itch with a (virtual) posthumous existence, outliving the scratch that extinguished it. I may speak truthfully about an itch I claim to have had yesterday but no itch could in and of itself be “true” any more than it could be a lie.
We are touring the foothills of knowledge: objects beyond experience; possibilities beyond actuality; an outside of discourse beyond space and time; and the beginning of the realm of truths and falsehoods that supervene on Being. We have entered the space of propositional awareness; of what-is elevated to “that-which-is” or “that which is the case”: the realm of “thatter”. It is here that we find all three elements of the standard, if problematic, definition of knowledge: true, justified belief. Truth, justification, and belief all belong to the same space, that has much in common with what Sellars (to whom we shall return) called the Space of Reason, which is fundamentally different from the space of mere sensation.
More broadly, “thatter” accommodates, and indeed is woven out of, instances of “what is the case” heralded by a sense, a thought, or an out-loud or written down assertion, of what might be the case, at present, in the past, or in the future. This is the space in which we are deployed in our everyday practical engagement with each other and the material world, where possibilities are ceaselessly articulated. From the slightly topsy-turvy standpoint of this space, actuality seems like the fulfilment of prior possibilities, possibilities that have already been entertained. We do not, however, leave behind the space of sentience or the space and time occupied by our bodies. When I shake hands with you, this greeting has its meaning in the “thaterial” world of symbolic meaning, but it must be executed by flesh occupying the physical world: our hands have to clasp each other.
It is important not to rush the journey from sentience to knowledge and arrive too early at articulate discourse and the higher-level world-pictures that have prompted our inquiry. Before we reach the kinds of sentences that are exchanged in chatter and more measured communication, in gossip and science, we should pause at those propositional attitudes that make up the sea of “thatness” out of which specific propositions crystallize. Man is the believing, fearing, desiring, regretting, doubting, wondering, supposing as well as asserting, thinking, affirming and denying animal. While in some cases (for example “wondering”) “that” may be replaced by “wondering if” or “wondering whether”, the latter really incorporate an implicit “that”. Even idle wondering is haunted by the ghost of an assertion corresponding to a seriously entertained possibility.
There is a distance between (say) wondering and its articulation as something that carries a full-blown truth value just as there is a distance between an anxiety and what we say to someone to whom we are looking for comfort. Even so, there is a free-floating “that” implicitly present in both the wondering and the nail-biting. Our circumscribed propositional attitudes are a half-way house between on the one hand a general “propositional awareness” that characterizes unfolding human consciousness and on the other formal propositions which assert or deny that “X is the case”. Propositional awareness is the bridge between Being and things that are asserted or denied to be the case. It is that in virtue of which truth supervenes on Being. While any sentient being may suffer on account of what is there, only for the propositional (human) animal is what-is transformed into “That x is” and “That not-x is not”.
This paragraph may seem to do no work but it is intended to emphasize the distance, often overlooked or compressed, between sentience and knowledge whose most developed form is propositions corresponding to facts. I have not attempted to explain the basis of this transition, even less to explain why man is uniquely “The Knowing Animal”.8 Our present concern is not with genetic epistemology but with highlighting the two-stage journey to “that” if we adopt sentience as a starting point: first, the passage from sensation to the experience of objects that are intuited as existing independently of experience; and secondly, the transition from an intuition of a world of free-standing objects to an epistemic realm of “that”.
The latter realm is so prominent in our lives that there is a temptation to assert that it gathers up all that there is. Take this passage from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: “To give the essence of a proposition means to give the essence of all description, and thus the essence of the world”.9 It is as if the world were entirely dissolved into “that”, such that “matter” had been superseded by “thatter”. This assertion is of a piece with the famous oracular opening of the Tractatus:
1 The world is all that is the case.
1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not of things.
[…]
1.13 The facts in logical space are the world.10
This is probably not as linguistically idealistic, or at least language-bound, as it may seem. First, Wittgenstein may mean the human world rather than (say) the universe of which the human world is a minute and brief part. Secondly – although this is not Wittgenstein’s point – it has to be acknowledged that within the human world there are no naked or pure objects. We see objects through the lens of knowledge: we cannot separate sentience from intelligibility; there is no return to the innocence of sensation. Tables, chairs, even trees, rocks and clouds, come to us saturated with meaning: they are not inscrutable lumps of matter. Even useless objects engage our attention as items which intervene between us and our goals or as the background to our goal-oriented activity. And all objects have a potential significance, even naturally occurring ones: trees as possible cover, clouds as the threat of rain, rocks as potential missiles. Even nonsense has a privative sense as a bounded interruption in sense. General meaning is thus wall-to-wall, which may seem to license the notion that Being dissolves entirely into thatter – although this (to reiterate) was not Wittgenstein’s position.
There are, however, dangers in gathering up all that there is in “thatter”. The obvious objection comes from the self-evident point that “That x is the case” presupposes x, even though the x may not be self-bounding. The dangers are often concealed when “thatter” is identified not with “knowledge” in the broadest and richest sense but with “information” a term so hospitable as to be able to encompass every event in the universe. We have already mentioned, and will return to, John Wheeler’s “IT from BIT”. For the present, I shall focus on something a bit more mainstream: the view that “All is Information”. It is exemplified in this passage from David Chalmers:
[W]herever there is causal interaction, there is information, and where there is information, there is experience. One can find information states in a rock – even when it expands and contracts, for example – or even in the different states of the electron. So there will be experience associated with a rock or an electron.11
This extraordinary claim not only assimilates material e
vents in the material world to conscious experiences but also (more relevant to our present concerns) collapses the distance between experience and knowledge – given that “information” is a large part of what knowledge knows – as well as between consciousness and the material world. It is a version of a panpsychism that (to use Chalmers’s words) “makes consciousness less ‘special’ in some ways, and so more reasonable” because it is “better integrated into the natural order”.12 The obverse of assimilating matter to information is to assimilate thatter to matter. We have a universe that is not only self-intimating at every level but identical with its own self-intimation.
It is a view that pops up in all sorts of surprising places. The determinedly tough-minded, materialist philosopher D. M. Armstrong makes the, perhaps uncontroversial claim, that the world “is a world of states of affairs”. More controversially he concludes from this that “it is not made up of things, but of things-having-properties and things-related-to-other things”.13 He concludes from this that “Reality has a propositional structure”.14 The idea that Reality (with a capital initial letter, so it must be the real thing) is propositional suggests that it constitutively has the form of a proposition. Just how odd this is can be highlighted if we remind ourselves that a proposition is what is expressed by a sentence – or the information content of a sentence. Such information has a structure somehow connected with that of a sentence. We can, it appears, cut out the middle man; namely humanity that divides it up through looking at what-is through a propositional lens. The path to such a strange conclusion – a rather literalistic form of the logical atomism espoused by Russell and Wittgenstein – is easy to see. Armstrong seems to ascribe to the basic stuff of Reality a proto-propositional form. His “things-having-properties” and “things-related-to-other things” look suspiciously oven-ready to be turned into the kinds of subjects and predicates, or relations between objects, that are in fact only picked out by articulate judgement.
To avoid this result it is necessary only to restate the obvious and to resist identifying the realm of knowledge either with the basic stuff of the world in which humans live (although only humans are knowing animals) or even with nature. We affirm the existence of two distinct realms. The temptation is to label these two realms that of knowledge and that of the known but that carries dangers because there is a sense in which that which is known is to some degree a cognate – but real – object of knowledge. This relationship is rather like that of the recto and verso of a sheet of paper but only in the sense that they are cut out at once: “the fact that x” is scissored out by the sentence that specifies it. This is clear in the case of knowledge of abstract objects such as (say) economic trends, social attitudes, or items that are badged with “-ness” and “-hood”. But it is true wherever items are brought together in a state of affairs expressed in a sentence – such as “The chairs were arranged untidily”. And indeed, it applies in the case of a single item whose qualities are identified and attached to it as predicates to a subject: something as elementary as “The chair is green” – never mind “The chair is old” where the predicate cannot be contained in any moment-to-moment state of the object.
In short, the natural world does not serve itself up in fact-shaped or fact-sized pieces nor does it have a propositional structure. Consequently, pieces of knowledge could not result simply from the impingement of bits of nature on the sensorium of an organism. Richard Robinson’s claim: “States resulting from events are very common in nature; and knowledge is one of them. Knowledge results from apprehension as the blackened and roofless state of a house results from a fire”15 could not be further from the truth.
It is an appropriate time to examine a particularly striking way of characterizing the distinctive realm of knowledge associated with the twentieth-century American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars, in his famous attack on “The Myth of the Given”, a myth that we have already touched upon in a different way in our critique of the notion that there is something called “reality” which corresponds to the self-intimation of Being and the related idea that there is a capacity of (material) Being in virtue of which it would generate the truth about itself without the assistance of a consciousness or a community of minds interacting with it. The myth we are addressing could be characterized as “the myth of the self-given”.
Sellars’s argument was directed against foundationalism – the idea that all our knowledge rests on cognitive states that are basic in the sense of not depending on other cognitive states for their truth:
One of the forms taken by the Myth of the Given is the idea that there is, indeed must be, a structure of particular matters of fact such that (a) each fact can not only be noninferentially known to be the case, but presuppose no other knowledge either of particular matter of fact, or of general truths; and (b) … the noninferential knowledge of facts belonging to this structure constitutes the ultimate court of appeal for all factual claims – particular and general – about the world.16
The elements in the “ultimate court of appeal” for factual claims would typically be the offspring of direct experience of, or acquaintance with, their object. Such “foundational” knowledge would presuppose no other knowledge. In the analytical tradition which Sellars was rejecting, they would be characterized as “sense data” or (direct) knowledge of appearances. Against this atomism, Sellars argues that knowledge is all of a piece; or at very least connected with other pieces of knowledge: it is this that justifies their counting as full-fledged cognitive states. Acquiring knowledge noninferentially would involve the exercise of conceptual capacities just as much as does higher-level or more explicitly inferential knowledge and such capacities are based on prior knowledge.
Knowledge cannot, therefore, be acquired incrementally or atomically from discrete encounters with the world through sense experiences. It belongs to what he called the logical space of reasons: “In characterizing an episode or a state as that of knowing, we are not giving an empirical description of that episode or state; we are placing it in the logical space of reason, of justifying and being able to justify what one says”.17 In short, knowledge acquires its immediate warrant through a side-ways connectedness with other pieces of knowledge rather than via a ground floor vertical connectedness between a piece of knowledge and the personal sensory experience that both generates and justifies it. This is most clearly evident in the case of scientific knowledge in which, as Quine, (whom we have already quoted) states “face the tribunal of sense experience as a corporate body” even though he envisaged knowledge, and its validity, being tracked ultimately to the impingement of energy on nerve endings.18
Knowledge, even when it takes the apparent form of discrete facts, is both networked and constrained in the way that Sellars described – as did many twentieth-century, particularly American, philosophers after him, notably Donald Davidson. The veto forbidding “p and not-p” is usually exercised in a less formal demand of consistency and coherence. If I was in Paris at 12 noon on Tuesday, I can’t have been in London at 12 noon; nor could I have been in London at 12:05; nor could I have directly witnessed two people walking down a street in London at 12 noon, but I could have seen two people walking down the street outside my hotel in Paris. These constraints may seem like a direct transcription from the physical world to the logical space of reasons. However, the physical connectedness of my being in a specific hotel in Paris and my seeing two people walking down the street is not like the connectedness of (the fact) that I was in Paris and (the fact) that I saw the two people in the relevant street. In neither case are the facts located side by side or connected through such a location. The facts about what occupied what space and at what time do not themselves occupy a particular space and a particular time. This may be clarified by another example. The Battle of Hastings took place just north of Hastings and began at 9 am on 14 October 1066 and ended at dusk of the same day. The fact that the Battle occurred did not end at dusk on 14 October nor is that fact located just north of Hasti
ngs. As a denizen of logical space, as something for which there is empirical justification, evidential proof, as an item that rules out other possibilities, it has no location in space or time.
We now come to Sellars’s essential point. Theories are connected by implication with what Quine calls their “checkpoints” in observation. Nothing in nature, however, implies anything else: implication arises in the space of inferences. At the heart of the space of reasons is the possibility of conflicts utterly unlike the collisions and constraints of the natural world. The most straightforward expression is the veto on “p and not-p”. In the logical space of reasons, two items cannot occupy the same point at the same time: the cat cannot be (p) and not be (not-p) in a specific state or place at time t. This mutual exclusion of two possibilities may seem to map on to the kinds of mutual exclusion seen in physical space-time but the latter applies to material actualities and not possibilities. “Not (p and not-p)” does not describe a forbidden collision.
Beyond this, there is indirect justification arising from more complex trails of consistency, from networks of connected beliefs, or from appeal to the habits of the material world expressed in the laws of nature given propositional form. This space is a space of quarrels unlike those known to nature where, for example, two objects exclude each other from the same space, or consequences such that one event has a causal consequence. There is no “if-then” in the material world; it is no more populated by protases and apodoses than by narratives.
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