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.
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.