Logos

by Tallis Raymond

  The most potent argument for the causal theory of knowledge would seem to be the fact that we have to be situated in a certain place to be in receipt of knowledge. However, while this applies to perception, we typically receive knowledge without being in the vicinity of the states of affairs or events that are its objects. Most knowledge is mediated by the spoken or written testimony of others. An attempt to rescue the causal theory by arguing that the testimony is an intermediate cause does not work. The intermediation is not comparable to paradigmatic causal sequences such as those seen in the natural world. The putative causal chain driving testimony would be anomalous, to put it mildly.

  The causal theory of direct or mediated knowledge ultimately implies that the material world ventriloquizes itself, or truths about itself, through the mouths that are causally wired into it. The Truth (and The Untruth) is not located in the objects, events, processes that truths are about and generated as the causal effects of those states of affairs, objects, events and processes. The recent “e-ttenuation” of our reflective, epistemic consciousness dissipated through countless electronic devices with the capabilities they confer on us and the enticements they offer is only the latest stage in our deindexicalization through pages and pictures to a boundless elsewhere, that is the realm of “thatter”. The contents of computer screens that reveal and conceal the world are the most recent manifestation of the primordial pre-thatter of the visual field which reveals a reality that it in part conceals.

  Thus, and such, is our life in “that which is the case”. Our life in the sea of thatter, of truths that can be contested, set against one another, united in confirmation, exposed to the test of set-piece experience, connected and separated, and are available to be challenged or developed, over minutes, days, weeks, years, decades and centuries, as sense-making humans pursue both local solutions and ever-widening understanding.

  It is important not to end this inquiry into “thatter” without emphasizing the extent to which sense-making is active. Sentience requires no work on our part; indeed, it is inescapable. Even where we actively seek out basic experiences – for example travel long distances to sunbathe – the final step involves no effort: it is receptivity. “Thatter”, however, is the fruit, often hard-won, of scrutinizing, testing, measuring, puzzling over and puzzling out. The effort may be individual or collective or (typically) that of an individual jumping off from a cognitive plaform constructed by the collective. And sense once made (note the verb) may be made for all time or (more often) made and lost, requiring to be made all over again. The different dimensions of mental effort – mobilizing attention, recollection, reasoning – are some of the most constant accompaniments of our life in the sea of thatter – in the “thaterial” world.

  That our gazes reach out, and form the basis for discovery, invention, construction, interpretation – often based on the joining of experience or a platform of pre-joined experience, implicit in concepts and prior knowledge – underlines the extent to which sense-making is not merely mirroring what-is, even less is an effect of outside material events. Our thoughts are not the mere slaves of our impressions, and the interpreted world is not simply the givenness of objects confiding their intrinsic nature for our enlightenment. The aureole of possibilities that surrounds what is outside of us is also in part imposed by us on it.

  And there is another important point. In Chapters 3 and 4 we examined attempts to explain the efficacy of our sense-making by closing the distance between the sense-maker (or, narrowly, the mind) and the world (narrowly, Nature) that is made sense of. We can now see that collapsing the distance does not solve the problem: we need the distance if knowledge is to count as knowledge. By an irony that we noted in Addendum 2 to Chapter 5, both the purest materialism and panpsychism, notwithstanding their seeming to be opposite extremes, have this problem in common. They both lose the distance implicit in the fact that (say) matter becomes “matter” only in certain privileged pieces of matter – namely human beings; and that the Given is “given” to or for minute instances of itself – namely, we human beings. By reducing mind to matter or spreading mind throughout matter, we fail to account for the necessary distinction between the knower and the known.

  In the next two chapters, we shall return to the limitations of knowledge and sense-making – beyond the fact just examined – and argue that it is not, and cannot be, the Pure Givenness of What-is. At the heart of understanding is the sense that that which is understood lies beyond the process of understanding, even beyond the language in which understanding is expressed. There needs to be an at least partially opaque Other for something to be seen. In the final chapter, we will take this argument further and examine critically the very idea of complete understanding.

  Addendum Squeezing out thatter: deflationary, disquotational, disappearance theories of truth

  Even where it is not actively resented and denied – along with the intentionality that opens up the space it comes to occupy and expand – thatter is easily overlooked by philosophers. A revealing expression of this is to be found in so-called deflationary, disquotational, or disappearance theories of truth. While these theories have been developed with considerable sophistication, their origin can be traced to, and their essence captured in, a couple of very simple ideas, associated in particular with Frank Ramsey and Alfred Tarski.

  Ramsey argued as follows that the idea of truth was vacuous or redundant:“Truth and falsity are ascribed primarily to propositions. The proposition to which they are ascribed may be either explicitly given or described. Suppose first that it is explicitly given; then it is evident that ‘It is true that Caesar was murdered’ means no more than that Caesar was murdered.”33 To generalize: to assert that “p is true” is to assert no more than that p. The seeming qualification “is true” therefore adds nothing. “Truth” is neither a predicate, a property, or a grammatical feature altering the sense of a proposition of which it is affirmed. Thus is truth deflated, to the point where it looks like disappearing.

  A close inspection of the players in the deflationary theory takes us, via Tarski, to the disquotational theory. Tarski illustrated the truth predicate as follows:

  “Snow is white” is true if and only if snow is white.

  While it is by no means certain that he wanted to deflate truth, his theory of truth was taken to this conclusion by many, among others (and most famously) Quine. Quine focuses on the fact that there are two players in the statement, one in quotation marks “Snow is white” that is embedded in the other:

  Quotation marks make all the difference between talking about words and talking about snow. The quotation is the name of a sentence that contains a name, namely “snow”, of snow. By calling the sentence true, we call snow white. The truth predicate is a device for disquotation.34

  Many philosophers have found cutting truth down to size in this way very attractive. It seems, for a start, to bypass the problems associated with other theories of truth. The correspondence theory – persuasive for many reasons, including the fact that it seems to capture how truth “faces” the world – presents the challenge of defining the corresponding partners in the relationship. Even where their fundamentally different nature – for examples utterances on the one hand and bits of the mute world on the other – is denied to pose a problem, there are still difficulties in specifying what it is that true statements state and consequently in picking out the truth-makers that make them true. Coherence theories, such that the truth of one proposition resides in its consistency with other true propositions seems to suggest a “pass the parcel” responsibility for truth warrants, though it does reflect the facts already noted that the Space of Reasons to which knowledge belongs is not populated by atomic individuals with their own separate truth grounds: the truth claims of theories face “the tribunal of experience corporately”. Coherence theories seem to allow truth to be affirmed independently of any genuine external reality. And pragmatic theories, as we have seen in Chapter 4, fail dismally to con
nect truth with the much-touted, tough-minded “cash value”, least of all a contribution to biological survival. However, if the disquotational theory avoids all these problem, it does so only by entirely missing the nature of truth and consequently locating it in the wrong place.35

  Let us go back to the beginning. Deflationary theories conclude, from the fact that there is no difference between saying p and saying p is true, “is true” adds nothing. This, Ramsay’s conclusion, would be valid if the correct place to look for the nature of truth would be in the difference between “p” and “p is true”. The category of truth (and falsehood) however lies upstream of both sentences. Truth must already be in place for there to be assertions “that p” and assertions “that p is true”. All Ramsay’s argument establishes is that truth is not a predicate applicable to propositions, sentences, or assertions. If it were such, then the truth of (say) a proposition would be an intrinsic or constitutive property of the item in question. We would then have the absurd consequence that propositions, sentences, or assertions would be true (or false) irrespective of anything else in the world. Truth is an irreducibly relational property. That is why the opposite view – that the truth of a proposition resides exclusively in the world it is about – is also incorrect. A state of affairs is neither true nor false, though its existence may make an assertion true. If states of affairs had truth values in themselves, they would be the site of an infinite number of contradictions, as they would be both true (of all propositions that say true things about them) and false (of all the propositions that say false things about them).

  Quine’s disquotational deflationary theory, notwithstanding its surface differences from the disappearance theory, has this in common with it; namely, that both theories seek the nature, the location, of truth in the difference between two sentences or types of sentences. The difference in the disquotational theory is between “snow is white” and snow is white. The former sentence names or specifies itself and the latter strips off the quotations and names or specifies a piece of the world. This is roughly the difference between a sentence being mentioned – referring to and hence talking about itself – and between a sentence being used – referring to and hence talking about the world. The same criticism applies to both theories: they fail to find truth because they look for it in the difference between assertions that, being assertions, are downstream of the establishment of truth (and falsehood). Truth is already in place in “p” “snow is white” and so it won’t be found in the difference between “p” and “p is true” or between “snow is white” and snow is white.

  Truth is, at the very least, a relationship that requires two relata: a proposition (typically asserted through a sentence) and a piece of the world. It is not a property of the relata such as sentences as we have seen; but neither is it a property of the world. Tarski, for example, would not question this. But we need then to examine the relata. A proposition is not in itself either true or false. Nor is a piece of the world such as a chair in a room either true or false. It may become a truth-maker of the assertion that there is a chair in the relevant room but it is innocent of its role: being the truth-maker of an assertion is not a monadic or constitutive property of a piece of the world such as an object or a state of affairs. The relationship is located in the space between thatter and what it is that is. Deflationary theories of truth are a symptom of the endeavour to collapse the gap between matter and thatter.

  To summarize, we may think of truth as “thatter” or explicitness that may be captured in different ways, the most powerful, precise, and elaborated being language, typically when it is used to make declarative statements. To seek the stuff of truth in the difference between one set of sentences (p) and another (p is true) and to declare the notion of truth redundant because no difference can be found (Ramsey) or to reduce it to the difference between sentences about sentences and sentences about the world (Tarski/Quine) is to seek it in the wrong place. Making truth an internal relationship within language is certain to result in losing the distance between Being and truth; or to collapse the distance opened up when articulate, conscious (human) beings encounter Being as that which is. Truth supervenes on Being and Being does not supervene on itself in order to make itself into truths.

  Deflationary theories of truth make it easier for the advocates of a naturalism that aspires to do without intentionality – which fits so badly into the physicalist world-picture – to wire our humanity into the material world. It is exemplified by this claim from Quine: “knowledge, mind and meaning are part of the same world that they have to do with, and … they are to be studied in the same empirical spirit that animates natural science”.36 They are all products of “neural intake”.

  Such naturalism – which has often had the ambition of finding “ought” in “is” by translating values into the biological imperatives and moving validity from the space of reasons to that of nature by a similar pragmatic wheeze – strays even further off course when it tries to find “is” in is. Finding an “is” in is presents a more profound challenge to naturalism than the venerable problem of deriving an “ought” from “is”.37

  CHAPTER 7

  Senselessness at the heart of sense

  Kick at the rock, Sam Johnson, break your bones But cloudy, cloudy is the stuff of stones.

  Richard Wilbur1

  Some knower must remain behind the lens for anything to be known.

  Thomas Nagel2

  We have arrived at the image of ourselves as sense-making animals facing the world, individual representatives of a community of minds. This was an affirmative note since it underlined the extent to which we are liberated, through thatter, particularly in the form of knowledge, from our material surroundings and indeed from the biological mire that supports sentience. Our flesh of course is a necessary condition of our being sense-making animals; and the needs of the flesh give sense-making its primary, although not its sole, purpose, contributing overwhelmingly to its content, in virtue of supplying the needs that are its first and last agenda. Those needs are, of course, transformed over history and the viewpoint from which that agenda is pursued and its knowledge is acquired and organised is not socketed in an ecological niche as is the case with other animals. Looking on a world that for the most part does not look back at us, is the ultimate basis for our ability to bring about events, to utilize material happenings as handles that can be used to shape what happens in accordance with our goals, and to be the authors of genuinely free actions. The present chapter is less optimistic and prepares the way for a critical examination, in the final chapter, of the seemingly uncontroversial idea of absolute cognitive progress and the perhaps more obviously questionable hope of our getting ever closer to a complete understanding of the world (including ourselves as part of it.)

  The idea of the subject facing a world of objects is of a relationship. The quorum for the cognitive tango is two – something that is reflected in the connection-across-separation that is our mode of relating to and engaging with the world and is most clearly acknowledged in the correspondence theory of knowledge and truth. Unless we subscribe to idealism, the two relata will be in some important sense external to one another;3 there will therefore be an irreducible otherness in what is known – the first relatum. Less obviously, there will be an otherness within the knower – the second relatum. Less obviously still, there will be an otherness within knowledge itself. Without these modes of other-than-knowledge at its heart, knowledge would lack specificity; without their opacity, it would lack being; without the distance they mark, it would lack transcendence. In support of these claims let us examine the two relata in turn.

  First, the world that is faced. If we begin with a literal facing whose paradigm is visual perception, it is evident that opacity is necessary for something to be seen. An entirely transparent world would be invisible. We would look not at it but through it and consequently see nothing at all. Without the opacity of things, there are no things “there”. There would be no (
visible) difference between observing a busy scene and staring into empty space. Similar principles apply to other senses, such as touch. We touch only surfaces and when we break through surfaces it is to other surfaces. A breaking through that exposed the entire object as tangible surface with nothing beneath it would result in an intangible object. The sense of touch is delivered by the resistance of that which is not currently being touched. To generalize, the world faced by the subject, therefore, must have a residual opacity or, more generally, hiddenness. Without the (as yet) unrevealed, there would be nothing “out there”.

  There are two immediate objections to this conclusion and they are connected: a) the hiddenness is only temporary and can be amended; and b) what is true of perception is not true of the knowledge and concept-based understanding with which we are most centrally concerned.

  To take the first point, consider that which must be hidden from sight in an object such as a cup, necessary to block the light so that it is visible. I can (in part) correct the invisibility experienced from one direction by examining it from another angle: walking round the other side of it, turning it round or upside down. And I can correct the intangibility of the depths that make it tangible by breaking it and palpating its fragments. This, however, does not result in complete visibility liberated from invisibility, or total tangibility without residual intangibility. In the case of touch, the fragments would still have hidden depths beneath the palpable surface if it were to be palpable. And in the case of vision, even if the gaze had been comprehensive, there would still be an inside of the material of the cup, hidden from view. More tellingly, the hiddenness would not be abolished at any given time but only varied as the gaze or the touch moved from place to place. There would be no all-at-once revelation: as I touch the under-surface of the cup, I lose touch with the rest of its surface. And this is true a fortiori of a landscape we are looking at and the ground we stand on or, more generally, the perceived world in which we pass our hours. We could express this by saying that without opacity, without evident limits, experience would not be experience of – experience of something that exceeds the experience.4 It is the warrant of the otherness, and hence the reality, of the experience.