Ask a Silly Question Part II: Nil Unum Ad Ignorantiam

Fortunately for all concerned, Skin-the-Cat has greater fortitude and more available thighs than previously supposed.  I am, as a result able to continue our last conversation almost as speedily as those milky white and powerful limbs can be scanned into a computer and posted.

     We were discussing, if you turn back to a previous thigh, some supposedly simple things; I had got as far as one.  This list is worth continuing, at least as far as two or three, possibly even four, not least because it is in such matters that the fundamental differences between personalism and other forms of philosophical speculation are to be found.

     To continue, therefore, upon the next thigh, with...

2) Knowledge
     This is an old philosophical saw, but I don’t know that it has ever been satisfactorily answered.  Correct me if I’m wrong; please do, it would be a great help. However, the standard Gettier-type formula which says knowledge is justified true belief has never seemed very satisfactory to me.  For one thing, it raises more questions than it answers, not least in terms of what is meant by the three supposedly explanatory constructs.

     Justification may not be entirely subjective but it will have a distinctively perspectival, because purposeful, dimension to it.  As hard boiled L. A. gumshoe and Elizabethan poet, Philip Marlow, once said, ‘evidence is all about how you look at things and who’s neck is in the noose.’   The same, more or less, goes for justification.  It all depends on what you’re trying to do to whom and who you’re trying to convince that it’s right to do it.

     The tattooist just asked me whether it makes any difference if it’s the old logical justification we’re about. It does not.

     Apart from anything else, logical justification will hardly cut the Coleman’s when it comes to the vast majority of things we claim to know, including the many that, as Polanyi reminds us, we only know tacitly.  We might also assert, with some justification (as it were), that all real knowledge is practical and so, ultimately, will out-run logical analysis.  However, and in less confrontational tones (the man has a needle poised over the groin of my friend), even if we exclude the tacit and the practical and seek only to justify logical constructions, we are not, I hope going to start pretending that logic is eternal and unchanging.  Logic, lest we forget, is a function of language; and language, its logics, and its justificatory procedures are activities undertaken by persons for specific purposes.

     But the look on Skin-the-Cat’s face entreats me not to get side-tracked.  As regards truth and belief, I shall limit myself to observing that it is not particularly clear what they mean either.  Is truth a matter of correspondence between propositions and states of affairs, as philosophers once insisted?   I shouldn’t think so.  Something a touch more constructive might be more useful; more capable, that is, of accommodating the role we play in seeking and finding.  At the very least.

     As for belief, someone once told me that belief is an attitude, quite possibly a propositional one, that we take towards some object external to us.  Well, that rather nicely misses the point.  If the belief we are talking about is religious (it was) then the object is actually a subject and it’s difficult to see how a Sovereign Will, as Farrer called it, expressed through creation and providence could be external to us.  More importantly, perhaps, talk of attitudes, propositional or otherwise, hardly captures the real meaning of the term ‘belief’.  Surely, it’s not enough to simply adopt an attitude towards the divine; don’t I have to do something?  Something like understanding and attempting to practise the tenets and creeds of the religion I claim to confess, for example.

     You will not, I imagine, be surprised by the general direction of my thinking on this subject.  An ‘activist’ or ‘interactionist’ epistemology – grounded, as ever, in Farrer, Feuerbach, Hampshire, et al. – seems like the right way to go.  Knowledge is acquired through active exploration; what’s more, Farrer observed, we can hardly be said to know something unless we can do something about it.   Knowledge arises from interference and issues in control.  This is why, many many years ago (before the world had heard of snow), Charles Conti described knowledge as an honorific. It is earned through our activities.

     All of which might lead one to wonder whether knowledge can be objective.  That, however, is a question that will have to wait, for Skin-the-Cat has turned out to be much less invincible than once supposed.  The poor fellow is sadly hors d’oeuvre; fainted dead away.  This may be a result of my insisting that the scribe spell ‘interactionist’ correctly or it may be due to some hitherto unknown weakness of constitution on the part of our hairy tabula.  The tattooist claims to have a cure.  Not holy water and the sign of the cross but a bottle of clear liquid with a curiously powerful smell of antifreeze coming off it.  We shall apply the cure orally and see what happens.  You may expect a report in due course.