Theory of Knowledge

An Introduction

A. D. Woozley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000156102
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría filosóficas

Originally published in 1949. Understanding the questions is the major problem when beginning philosophy. This book does not attempt to provide the answers, but defines the questions and shows by example how they should be tackled. Subjects treated include the nature of the objects of thought and judgment; truth and error in belief; perception and knowledge of the material world; the status and function of memory.

1

INTRODUCTORY

1. Theories require questions

Any theory is an answer or set of answers to a question or set of questions; and answers can be unhelpful either because they are incorrect, or correct but unclear, or because the questions prompting them are unclear. The mother who diagnoses her child’s spots as measles is producing a theory; if she supposes the child has measles because she knows he has been in contact at school with other children who have developed measles, she is producing reasons in favour of her theory. The doctor who suggests that the spots are symptomatic not of measles but of acidity is producing a rival theory; if he supposes it because the child shows no other symptoms of measles, but has on the other hand been recently eating large quantities of plums, he is producing reasons for his theory; and if after treatment suitable to his diagnosis, e.g. by dosing the child with bicarbonate of soda and by cutting plums and possibly other fruit out of his diet, the spots then disappear, we would normally say that the doctor’s theory had been proved correct, and the mother’s theory wrong.

That is a simple and straightforward case where the question was clear, ‘What is the cause of my child’s spots?’ and where the rival answers were clear, ‘Measles’ and ‘No, not measles, but acidity,’ and where a decision between the rival answers can be made without much difficulty. Other cases can be far less straightforward, e.g. where the symptoms are not visible but internal, and where the patient cannot describe them clearly enough for the doctor to be sure exactly what question it is that he is supposed to be answering. Faced with little and possibly misleading information, the doctor has to indulge in more or less intelligent guesswork, and to try out alternative guesses in turn, until the trouble clears up; and even when it has, the doctor may not have produced a satisfactory theory about it, either because he is not sure which of the various treatments that he tried out did the trick (or even whether any of them did it), or because he still is not sure exactly what the trick was that he had been called on to do.

Now, one of the major difficulties facing anyone starting philosophy is to see what the questions are. And, indeed, many of the difficulties in which trained and experienced philosophers involve themselves are due, according to their fellow philosophers who criticise their theories, to their not being clear enough in the first place just what questions they were setting out to answer; if only they had been clearer about that, the criticism continues, they would have seen either that the questions which they were trying to answer were different from the questions which they thought they were trying to answer, or that there was really no question there at all and that it was only their own confusion which made them think that there was a question. As we shall see,¹ this criticism contains more than a grain of truth. Philosophy, indeed, sometimes seems to its practitioners to be a nightmare game of Snakes and Ladders in which the pattern of the board behind you is constantly changing, so that when you land on a snake and slide down it to a square where you were before, you find that the square is disturbingly different from what it was when you were there last time, and so are all the neighbouring squares.

2. What are the questions about knowledge?

What, then, are the questions which that branch of philosophy commonly known as the Theory of Knowledge is designed to answer? Or, rather, what are the questions which rival theories in that branch of philosophy are designed to answer? For there is no one and only theory of knowledge, but an immense variety of rival theories, alike only in that they claim to deal with the same subject matter (and to deal with it better than any of their competitors), although the exact questions which they think it proper to ask when dealing with that subject matter may and do differ from one theory to another. It is, therefore, impossible to avoid controversy over posing the questions; nor could one hope within the limits of this book finally to settle controversy raised. But controversy is desirable; only unreflective prejudice and passive acquiescence are to be avoided.

Since, therefore, a question is to be asked, I put it thus: ‘What is present to my mind when I think?’ This, it should be said at once, is only a first and very general formulation, which now needs to be whittled down into a more useful shape. What strikes one immediately as unsatisfactory about that formulation is the oddity of supposing that the (or even a) fundamental question about the theory of knowledge should be a question about thinking. For surely, it will be objected, knowing and thinking are fundamentally different and contrasted intellectual operations; we only say we think something is the case when we do not believe that we are entitled to say that we know it to be the case. I should ordinarily say, ‘I think it’s raining’, if on looking out of my window, although I could not see any drops falling, I could see people walking about in the street with their umbrellas up. I should not ordinarily say, ‘I know it’s raining’, if that was all the evidence I had to go on; it might, after all, just have stopped raining, but none of the people carrying their umbrellas up had yet noticed it. I should ordinarily say, ‘I know it’s raining’, if on looking out of my window I saw the drops falling or splashing on the road, or if I went outside and felt them on my face and hands. In fact we do not say ‘I know …’ when there is any room for doubt; instead we say ‘I think …’.

In answer to this objection there are, perhaps, two things to be said. First, ‘Theory of Knowledge’ is a misnomer. A theory of knowledge is not a theory only about the nature of knowing and the objects of knowledge; if it has any pretensions to completeness, it must be a theory about the range and limits of knowing, and about what happens beyond those limits. As we shall see, most of the problems are set to us precisely because a great many things of which we are in some sense aware and about which we judge are not objects of knowledge at all. Indeed, if all that we were concerned with was our ability to know, then the Theory of Knowledge would be a small and fairly arid field of philosophy; it is precisely our ability for not knowing and our capacity for making mistakes that produce the exciting problems. Therefore, until explained, ‘Theory of Knowledge’ is a misleading name for the subject, but once explained it should no longer mislead; and as it is the most commonly accepted name I shall continue to use it, employing also ‘epistemology’ as an exact synonym.

Secondly, in asking the question, ‘What is present to my mind when I think?’ I was using the word ‘think’ in the widest possible sense. One of the first lessons one must learn in philosophy is to appreciate that one word does not always have one and only one meaning. A great many disputes both in philosophy and in other subjects, whether theoretical or practical, owe their existence to the fact that the disputants are using the same word (i.e. the same sound if they are talking, or the same marks on paper if they are writing) with undisclosed differences of meaning.

Now, ‘think’ is used in a variety of senses: e.g. as synonymous with ‘believe’ or ‘judge’, as in ‘I think we are out of bread’; as synonymous with ‘reflect’, as ‘I have been thinking what to do with my savings’ ; and again in a much more general sense, as when one asks a companion. ‘What are you thinking?’ His reply may consist of telling you of something he was remembering, or something he was imagining, or something he was wondering about, and so on. We should not suppose that the only correct answer for him to give to our question, ‘What are you thinking?’ would be ‘Nothing’, unless he could truthfully say that he was thinking that something was the case (e.g. that we are out of bread), or that he was thinking about something, in the sense that he was trying to work out the answer to some problem, whether of practice or of theory. He might well have been doing neither of these things, and yet he could not truthfully answer ‘Nothing’ to our question, as long as he was conscious at all. True, one often is inclined to answer ‘Nothing’ when asked what one is thinking. But it is not a strictly truthful answer; and that is often indicated by the answer taking the lamer form of ‘Nothing really’.

A man tends to say that he was thinking of nothing either because he was not thinking in either of the two senses mentioned above, or because, apart from the fact that he was not thinking in either of those senses, he prefers not to tell the other person what was going on in his mind. It is less trouble to answer ‘Nothing’ than to try to describe thoughts which may not be interesting enough to be worth describing, or which may be of such a sort that one would prefer the other person not to know that one was having them. But as long as a man is aware of anything going on in his mind, even if it is only an incoherent stream of ideas or images, then he cannot answer truthfully ‘Nothing’ to the question, ‘What are you thinking?’ That is, in this sense, a man is thinking whenever he is conscious of anything, whether his consciousness takes the determinate forms of asserting, denying, questioning, doubting, remembering, imagining, daydreaming, etc., in short, whenever his mind is not a blank. Whether Descartes was right in maintaining that strictly one’s mind can never be a blank, or whether the old man was right who said that sometimes he sat and thought and sometimes he just sat, need not concern us here. What nobody is likely to deny is that for most of us most of the time when we are not asleep some stream of consciousness goes on; there is most of the time something ‘in’ our minds. Therefore the original question, ‘What is present to my mind when I think?’ can now be seen to be asking what are the objects of consciousness, using consciousness in its widest sense.

It must not, however, be assumed that what we are looking for is a special class of objects called ‘objects of consciousness’. Many philosophers in the past have made just that mistake, which is easy to make and important to avoid. There may be a special class of things which are objects of consciousness and not anything else, but so far as we have gone we have no reason for thinking that there is. Again, because different forms of consciousness might well have different objects, we cannot afford to start by assuming that they do not. Ordinary language certainly assumes that what I am aware of when I look around me are things of a different sort from what I am aware of when I am imagining, or, again, when I am dreaming.

Thus we must not at the outset suppose that an object of consciousness is a thing of a special sort; it may be found that things of more than one sort may be objects of different forms of consciousness; or it may be found that almost anything can be an object of consciousness, if being an object of consciousness simply consists in standing in a certain relation to a mind, just as anybody can be a brother, provided that he is male and that certain biological conditions involving his parents are fulfilled. Being a brother is not being a man of a particular sort or possessing particular characteristics, such as, on the other hand, being bald or pot-bellied is; being a brother is being a man of any sort standing in a particular relationship. So also, being an object of consciousness may be being an object of any sort standing in a particular relationship, namely that of being cognised by a mind.

Because ‘thinking’ is most commonly understood in one or other of the two senses specified above, i.e. as believing or as reflecting, I propose to substitute for it in its general sense the word ‘cognition’, which is sufficiently neutral and indeterminate to attract no preconceptions or prejudices. The Theory of Knowledge, then, is that branch of philosophy which has for its study the nature of cognition and its objects.

3. Epistemology and psychology

A further point which needs clearing up at this stage, at least in a preliminary way, is the relation between Theory of Knowledge and Psychology. Where does the first end and the second begin? and how is one to decide whether a given problem about the mind and its objects calls for a philosophical or a psychological solution? The answer is that no clear-cut answer can be given, that there is, at any rate at present, no absolutely sharp boundary line dividing the two. Just as the other natural sciences attained their independence by splitting off from the amorphous mass of knowledge called ‘philosophy’ so psychology is at present establishing its independence in the same way.

In England the process began at the end of the seventeenth century with John Locke, whose Essay Concerning Human Understanding was a treatise written ‘To enquire into the original, certainty, and extent of human Knowledge’, and purported to follow ‘a historical, plain method’.¹ The subject then known as ‘mental philosophy’ covered the whole range of questions now brought under the separate headings of theory of knowledge, scientific method, moral philosophy and psychology;¹ and even nowadays for a man to say that he is interested in psychology does not by itself inform his listener what he means; the latter may feel compelled to ask, ‘Do you mean philosophical psychology or experimental psychology? Do you sit in your study and introspect? or do you set laboratory puzzles to people and monkeys and rats?’

Nevertheless a distinction can be drawn which is suitable for our purposes. Psychology is an empirical science which tries to discover how our minds work—i.e. what the various mental processes are and what causal laws operate among them—with the object of giving as complete an explanation as possible of mental happenings, both normal and abnormal. Its methods are those of natural science, with the severe handicap that its subject matter is not available for direct inspection (except in the case of the experimenter himself), but has to be inferred from the observed appearances and behaviour of human (or sometimes non-human) bodies. Psychology, then, is interested in causal questions, in finding out how minds work. Epistemology, on the other hand, is interested in questions about what minds work on, what their material is, what its relation is to objects in the external world, to other persons’ minds, to the events of history, and so on.

Clearly, then, a question such as Locke was asking, ‘What is the origin of our ideas?’ may be a question in genetic psychology, or it may be a question in epistemology; one simply cannot tell without knowing the context to which the question belongs; and again one may find answering the one question an aid towards answering the other. Where they approach each other psychology and the theory of knowledge can only be demarcated by convention; and because in the borderland their interests and methods are similar, no advantage would be gained by insisting on a clear convention, although a time might come later when psychology has developed a higher precision, and when a clear-cut division would be required.

The general distinction between psychology and theory of knowledge, between the question how and the question what, may be illustrated by Memory, some of the problems of which will shortly concern us. Suppose that at this minute a memory enters my mind of myself eating a greasy steak of tunny fish in a village in north Spain ten years ago. That memory might interest the psychologist in two ways: he might wonder how events which happened in a man’s past, at a greater or lesser distance in time from the present, should be able to be recollected as they are in memory; he would be asking a causal question about how it happens that events from my past can be, as it were, retained in the file for future reference. He might also wonder how it is that at that particular minute that particular memory should occur to me, rather than that some other memory should occur to me now, or than that particular memory should occur to me at some other time. Here he would be asking a different causal question from the first; he would now be asking, given that a causal account can be given of the availability of my pas...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1 Introductory
• 2 Memory
• 3 Memory (continued)
• 4 Universals
• 5 Judgment
• 6 Truth as Correspondence
• 7 Truth as Coherence, and Truth as Fact
• 8 Knowing and Believing
• Index