The boundary between the space of reasons and the space of nature may seem semi-permeable, as when we see quasi-necessary connections between events, or types of material events, that are regularly associated or whose fidelity of association is discovered to be the manifestation of a general, if in the last analysis contingent, law, a more fundamental habit of nature. The essential point is upheld however: that knowledge is something that can be, and indeed should be, justified – typically as a result of being compatible with other knowledge. In short, knowledge is a normative term. Individual experiences would not deliver cognitive norms.
One does not have to agree with Sellars that the conceptual capacities that underlie knowledge rely on language to accept his point that knowledge is not something given in, or built up directly out of, sensory experiences and served up in discrete, independent atoms that do not presuppose other knowledge. “The Myth of the Given” – of an uncontaminated epistemological ground floor – is a reminder of just how derivative is even knowledge based on seemingly basic observations. There are, for instance, reliability conditions that justify an observation counting as knowledge; for example, the “good light” in which we can safely judge that something is of such-and-such a colour. What counts as “good condition” is also knowledge. And there are, of course, no intrinsic scales of observation in what-is that pick out its contents.
The identification of the realm of knowledge, of thatter, with a space of logical reasons would confine it too much. There is the narrow point that knowledge is necessary to serve unreason as well as reason: without knowledge or suspicion based on the exercise of the epistemic faculty, irrationality could not get off the ground.19 And there is a wider point that knowledge nourishes many kinds of propositional attitudes – wondering, disbelieving, daydreaming, hoping and so on – as well as straight knowing and the action of making assertions. Even so, Sellars captures something very important which it is worth dwelling on before we dig a little further.
The “Myth of the Given” that Sellars criticizes is rooted in a deeper myth that we have already alluded to: the “Myth of the Self-Given”. We may characterize it as the notion that the material world is somehow self-intimating – so that what is real for us is Being-in-itself. We addressed this in the previous chapter. Even further fetched is the idea that givenness – “that” – naturally divides into the referents of propositions that we simply harvest or hoover up with our senses. This is reflected in those assertions of Wittgenstein that we have already quoted: “1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not of things … 1.13 The facts in logical space are the world. 1.2 The world divides into facts.” To the contrary, the world – or at least the natural world – is neither a totality of facts, nor facts set out in a (presumably single or continuous or unified) logical space because it is not of itself divided into facts. More specifically, not even thatter is broken up in this way: it is not a bag of frozen ps – bounded perhaps by a bigger (even boundless) bag of not-ps20 (indeed, not-ps are parasitic on ps; there is, by definition, nothing corresponding to them). When we awaken to a truth – or The Truth – this is more than the switching on of a nexus of propositions inherent in the natural world.
Even so, it is easy to see why we may be seduced into reading propositions or a propositional structure back into the world we express through them. Yes, “knowledge … is essentially expressible in propositions” as Strawson said – or some knowledge anyway.21 Yes, we sometimes have p-shaped thoughts; more often make p-shaped assertions; and even more frequently encounter p-shaped written discourse. Because what is committed to print is most public – most conspicuously what we have in common and what we trade in as we engage with each other in trying to articulate our shared world – we tend to think of it as being the essence of “thatter”. In truth, however, it is simply the most visible expression of, the public face of, thatter.
The “Space of Reasons” therefore goes beyond the realm of propositions or indeed of knowledge or facts. As for the latter, it is important not to think that they fall neatly into two categories – those that belong to Nature and those that belong to a cultural, interhuman, space that is remote from nature. John Searle, mistakenly in my view, distinguished what he called “brute” physical facts from “social” and “institutional” ones with the former being natural.22 In truth all facts are in some sense social or institutional. Nature does not carve itself into facts: it does not even pick out items such as “The dog is barking” or “The tree is green”. If there is such a thing as brute reality, it is not composed of facts (“that”); facts belong to the thatter-sphere which is not part of brute reality; facts are not alongside trees, bird and stones.
We can therefore accept Sellars’s fundamental point and acknowledge that what we know is not built out of cognitively basic elements hoovered up by our senses from the natural world. We must not, however, reduce “thatter” to facts or propositions, and facts and propositions in turn to those frozen entities that we encounter as written sentences – as opposed to dynamic and evaporating spoken ones. Yes, it would, of course, be difficult to overestimate the role that writing has played, over a relatively short span of the history of humanity, in vastly expanding the empire of “thatter”. And the written word is the meeting place of so many acts of sense-making. Even so, we must resist retro-fitting into propositional attitudes – thinking, believing, considering, even desiring or hoping – the formed propositions through which we communicate them in everyday conversation or (because we privilege this) formal, written discourse. Or read them back via propositional attitudes into the free-floating propositional awareness that constitutes our moment-to-moment consciousness.23 The latter is in constant interchange with the pre-propositional realm of sentience, as items enter and leave focused attention, that characterizes so much of human consciousness. The most formalized discourses comes to represent propositional awareness and thus marginalize, even conceal, the less formal aspects of propositional attitudes. Logic – the general theory of propositions – does not embrace the ocean of explicitness that is “thatter”. Individual propositions are simply the bubbles that arise out of the brew of expectation, recollection, intention, and so on.24 The unfolding of natural and human worlds is not a working out of a valid argument passing from premises to a conclusion or an expression of logical necessity. The veto on two objects occupying the same place at the same time or one object occupying two remote places at the same time is not the same as that on two contrary propositions.25
The coherence of the material world, in other words, is not the same as the logical consistency demanded of accounts of the world, of reports on knowledge, if they are to be accepted as true. And this is a way back to our more fundamental point: “thatter” with the truth values that it upholds is not a spontaneous glow of self-givenness by Being, irrespective of whether the latter is characterized as “Isness”, “Matter” or “Nature”. Nature did not acquire its own name: “Nature” would not be part of nature, even if it could have a view on itself. X does not generate “There is an X” or “X”; rather, it is through the propositional awareness of humans that Being becomes the existence of entities eventually picked out by existential quantifiers.
A pebble, a tree, or a chair is neither true nor false, valid or invalid: it simply is. Truth or falsehood arises only in relation to knowledge claims when propositions are asserted about the chair, such that the latter becomes a truth-maker, a guarantor that something or other is the case. The chair is neither in agreement with itself or at odds with itself. Only when it is asserted of a chair that it is, for example, located in a particular place can it participate in truth-making; and only when two contrary assertions are made about it can it be the apparent site of a contradiction, although the contradiction lies not in the chair (wherever it is located) but in the realm of thatter where assertions are located. This is the obverse of the fact that only in the Space of Reasons is there something corresponding to justification of belief transmitted through enta
ilment, or the undermining of belief transmitted through inferred contradiction.
For truth (and falsehood) to emerge there must be a relationship that goes beyond the empty relationship of identity captured by a peculiar sentence such as “x is x”. Neither material objects nor pure sensations go beyond themselves and establish a true relationship of “aboutness”. It is this relationship that holds open the distance that turns what-is into “what is the case”, transforms x into “that x is” and makes a parallel reality in which the world is an object of knowledge (and of conjecture and of that which is shown not to be knowledge), what-is is affirmed as being a reality rather than a mere possibility, and finally, there are explicit constraints on what is permissible.
This is a world we face from a kind of outside, an epistemic outside that seems to be inside in virtue of being other than all outsides. It is what is given, in the non-mythical Given. It is worth briefly reflecting on this inside-outside. Its seemingly basic platform is the place where we began this chapter: the individual accessing what he or she experiences as “surroundings” from a viewpoint defined by the location of telereceptors, most notably vision. This is a reality indexed to “me”, “here”, “now”, whose location is that of the existential centre of the body. But from the earliest days the reality is a shared one, temporally extended and not clearly delimited in space, and, created, curated, and elaborated by the community of minds into which we are inducted in the early years of our development.
The indexation of the world to our body and our present moment is therefore loose and discontinuous, with the immediate world being dappled by the deindexicalized reality of a world we access through knowledge. The most basic element of knowledge, even when applied to here and now and me, and accessed here and now by me, has no location in the literal space around, and the time of, my body, and belongs to everyone and no-one. Knowledge, unlike experience, is ownerless, is intrinsically something held in common.
Such is the thatter that we inherit and domesticate in our own world. It increasingly dominates our consciousness where pictures, words, texts, screens, speak to us from places not directly accessed by our senses. The facts are not in the paper they are written on and the truth is not in the filing cabinet where they are kept and only metaphorically in the mouths where they are recited. The archive is not located in the day or the century, the room or the country, of which it speaks.
The distance between knowledge and the world of direct encounter, between the space of thatter and the space of the material world, is underlined by the nature of the signs – words – in which knowledge is typically deposited. Words are utterly different from causal signs (“clouds mean rain”, “footprints mean beasts”) or iconic signs (reflections, pictures, shadows, echoes) in two fundamental respects: they do not typically occur naturally; and their signifying power does not depend on their having a natural connection with what they signify. Their phenomenal appearances – colour, size, shape, etc. – are irrelevant, like those of the results of measurement we discussed in the previous chapter. We look through or past the token sign. The word “blue” written in red does not mean anything different from “blue” written in blue or blue written (as it is on this page) in black. Likewise, “tomato” written in blue does not have a different meaning from “tomato” written in red or (indeed) black (it may have a slightly different significance).
The arbitrary or conventional nature of linguistic signs – and of the way they are combined according to grammatical rules – is the strongest possible reminder of the extent to which humans, inhabitants of the realm of “thatter” are not causally wired into the world or merely echoing it, but turned round to face it from an outside that is outside the outsides of the material world in which the material body and the objects that surround it are located.26 The irrelevance of the phenomenal appearance of linguistic signs to what they mean, the discretion we have over how we use them, and the fact that they are mobilized actively to mean meaning, is a striking reminder (if one was needed) of the uncoupling of human consciousness from the natural or, more broadly, the material world. It exposes the error of causal theories of knowledge even when they dare not speak their name: “One does not have to adhere to a causal theory of knowledge to accept that trivial contingent truths cannot be known other than by the evidence to which they are causally connected”.27 The idea that “evidence” (in support of knowledge claims) can be the effect of the natural world is no less reductionist than that knowledge can be. It assimilates intentionality to causation. Wittgenstein noted this error when it was applied to emotions: “We should distinguish between the object of fear and the cause of a fear. Thus a face which inspires fear or delight (the object of fear or delight) is not on that account its cause but, one might say, its target.”28 And by the time we have got to testimony – as when I say “His face frightened me the other day” – the domination of targeting over causation is evident. And most of our knowledge comes from testimony. The causal relationship is relevant to your hearing the sounds of my testimony and (less straightforwardly) to the fear caused by the face but not to my meaning the factual information you derive from it.
This is no trivial point since the uncoupling evident in knowledge whose intentionality is (to simplify things) in the opposite direction to causation creates the possibility of free action – a story for another place.29 What is more, the causal theory of knowledge is almost standard among philosophers. Let us stay with Quine whose view (as Barry Stroud summarizes it) is that: “Considered relative to the irritations at our sensory surfaces [the source of our knowledge], the physical objects we believe in are ‘posits’; statements of their existence are ‘far in excess of any available data’, past, present and future.”30 This is, of course, at odds with a truly causal theory of knowledge, if “cause” is to be taken in its proper sense; namely, the way it is intended in the very natural science to which Quine looks for his naturalized epistemology.31 For even at this seemingly most basic level of knowledge of material objects, Quine overlooks the usual expectation of the proportionality between cause and effect. It is hardly reflected in the relationship between objects and the “sensory irritations”, especially given that objects are “posits”.
Positing is an odd thing for an effect to do; positing its cause, even stranger; and positing a construct (an object) on its cause stranger still. This is not the kind of thing we are used to seeing in the material world, such as when lightning causes thunder. The thunder revealing, even illuminating, the lightning, hardly posits it.32 The causal theory of knowledge tries to gather up beliefs, their truth and their justification, what is known with that in virtue of which it is known, into a single mechanism. My belief that there is a dog in the room is supposed to acquire its status as a piece of knowledge (at the very least both true and justified) from the impact of the dog in the room on my nervous system. The causal link generates the belief, its normative status as being justified, and its standing as a piece of truth, all from the same source – quite some achievement for the causal energy of material events.
Quine and others have taken us up a useful cul de sac. By its very inadequacy, the causal theory of knowledge highlights the distance between “thatter” and what can be lived in the sense of being organically experienced; between Sellars’s space of reasons and the space of nature. Overwhelmingly, in the natural world, effects are nothing like beliefs, or truths, or the justification for ascribing truth to beliefs. Effects do not point to, or posit, their own causes: they require the assistance of conscious subjects who see effects as signs of causes. Nor is there in the material world any basis for there being a causal chain that does and one that does not justify a belief or make it true. There is nothing in causation as generally understood sufficient to generate truth and falsehood, or propositions with truth values.
There is nothing, also, to count for the fundamental difference between beliefs (or opinions), which are personal, and knowledge (of which there is no personal ownership). Wh
ile I own my testimony to the effect that there is a dog in the room, and the belief on which it is based, I have no ownership of the fact that there is a dog in the room – more generally that there is a dog in such-and-such a place at time t. Likewise, the fact that there was a battle at Hastings in 1066 belongs to no-one while my erroneous belief that it took place in 1067 is mine or belongs to the community of people who believe this. No causal chains can capture this difference between personally owned false beliefs and ownerless truths. What makes a belief knowledge is not to be found in the property of the belief or of a person who holds it.
Another manifestation of the non-natural nature of knowledge – that it is not to be understood as a material effect of a material cause – is that it does not translate back into sense experience, though the latter may be used to test knowledge claims. So even if perception were a mere effect of causes (which it is not), it remains the case that the contents of knowledge cannot be cashed without remainder as experience. That facts have a draft greater than any possible experience is not restricted to gigantic facts such as that the universe has such and such a diameter. Nobody could have an experience equal to “All swans are white”, never mind “Africa has had a troubled history” or “E = mc2”. Even the ordinary facts of our own lives, such as that I have lived for many thousands of days or am 200 miles from London, or the million facts about our own bodies (everything from the size of my spleen, the function of my liver, and the level of my blood potassium) are untranslated and indeed untranslatable without remainder into experience. And while the truth of empirical propositions is tested against experience, the experience is not itself translated into something equal to the referent of the propositions. This is the obverse of the fact that knowledge always exceeds experiences, including the first-, second- and third-hand experiences that justify its standing as knowledge. It transcends experience by being stripped of experience, as is most obviously the case in the processes of measurement discussed in the previous chapter.
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