On Perception, Belief, and Knowledge

 Consciousness gets defined as there being something it is like. This isn’t a classical analysis in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions, but it manages to elucidate what consciousness is (more or less); it captures the concept intuitively, if gnomically. In that spirit, I define knowledge as the world impinging on the soul—the affecting of the I by the It. Gnomic but suggestive. The main purpose of such definitions is to contrast the thing defined with other things in the conceptual neighborhood—in the case of consciousness, the physical world. In the case of knowledge, it is perception and belief: knowledge is different from these; they are not what knowledge is. So, what are they? If we knew this, we could say that knowledge is not that. In the same style, I will venture an answer—a suggestive formula not a classical analysis. It is something you might say to a child or an alien to get them to cotton onto the concept, or what sums up for an expert what these things amount to. Thus: perception is the world making itself felt, and belief is the mind taking itself into its own hands. Perception is the senses feeling the impact of the world, its causal power; the senses are what primarily are impacted not the mind or soul or self. These are so-called peripheral organs, unlike the intellect, and the impact may not be accepted by more central faculties—as in the case of visual illusion. We need not be swayed by what our senses tell us, but we cannot help being swayed by what our intellect tells us—what our faculty of knowledge tells us. Perception does not ipso facto reach as far as the soul, the inner sanctum where true knowledge resides. The senses are peripheral reflexes, psychophysical mechanisms, modular and mindless. They do what they are told by the stimulus, thoughtlessly. But the soul questions, resists, refutes; it doesn’t take the world’s impingent lying down. It impinges, I decide. Knowledge is less stimulus-world dominated than perception, though it takes the world very seriously, that being where knowledge ultimately comes from. In addition, the senses differ among themselves as to mode of causation and phenomenology, whereas knowledge is not modality-specific. You don’t feel your knowledge as in one sense modality rather than another. The soul (the central system) has stripped it of its original phenomenology. Knowing may be a type of seeing, but it isn’t the same as sensory seeing, i.e., the senses operating alone. Knowledge is above all that, proudly, autonomously. Knowledge is the master and perception is the servant. Knowledge is in me, but perception takes place outside of me—in my periphery (physically and psychologically). Knowledge belongs in the inner sanctum not the outhouses and reception rooms.

How about belief? Now this is another article altogether, a different kettle of mental fish. I said it is the mind taking itself into its own hands, not handing the job over to the world; world-impingement is not its sine qua non. It owes little loyalty to the world; it is all about itself, save per accidens. How can I be so accusatory? Because of wishful thinking, rash inference, emotional interference. Belief is the mind making itself felt, impinging on itself, shaping its own contours. Belief is internally propelled in its essence, though it may hook up with perception and knowledge when they suit its purposes. This makes belief quite different from knowledge—more like emotion. Belief is a sentiment. Belief is what you say in your heart, passionately. Knowledge is what you register in your brain, soberly. Your mind has a hold on your beliefs and bends them to its will. Beliefs can result from guesswork, inspired or otherwise, but knowledge never can. Belief loves conspiracy theories; knowledge abhors them. There is no such thing as wishful knowledge or irrational knowledge or baseless knowledge. But beliefs can thrive in an atmosphere of ignorance and emotion and prejudice. Knowledge is precious, but belief is often junk (unless allied with knowledge). The mind indulges in belief, but not in knowledge. Knowledge is open to the world, but belief is closed to it; a person could have a mind wholly constituted of false belief, but not false knowledge. Belief is subject to the will (possibly unconsciously), but knowledge is independent of the will. That’s why there is wishful belief but not wishful knowledge—wishful thinking but not wishful knowing. There could be a knowing mind without any beliefs at all, and the world be better for it. Beliefs are demons, or can be; they are the opposite of knowledge. Beliefs resent the impingement of the world (truth, reality).

If we picture the cognitive mind as consisting of three continents, we can say that these continents are separated by vast oceans and have very different geologies. They are made of different stuff. Roughly, perceptions are made of impressions, beliefs are made of volitions, and knowledge is made of facts: feelings, wishes, and truths. The geological strata may be overlaid by other strata, but when you dig down deep this is the material you come up with: igneous, metamorphic, sedimentary. Belief is a friable volatile rock; perception is a sturdy but breakable rock; knowledge is a solid dependable rock. Plato should have had a parable of the rocks in which he compared and contrasted perception, belief, and knowledge. To change the image: perception is like the wind, belief is like showers, and knowledge is like snowfall. Wind is tolerable and generally manageable, showers are annoying and you wish they would stop, and snow is occasionally unwelcome but always beautiful. (Consciousness is like a bright sunny day—that’s what what-it’s-like is like.)

What about the will? It too needs its summary formula, its striking image. I propose this: the will is the creature reaching out into the world. I envisage an octopus extending its tentacles, and lava flowing from a volcano, and a thunderstorm. I say “creature” because action is primordial and doesn’t even require sentience (see A. Schopenhauer). The reaching out is the creature extending itself into the world, tentatively, hopefully, adventurously. It is the soul impinging on the world in more advanced creatures. It is obviously not the same as perception, belief, and knowledge, though it can be joined to them. In willing the soul acts on the world instead of the world acting on it—the reverse of knowledge. We might even say, metaphorically, that it is the soul becoming known to the world. It is as if our artifacts have knowledge of us. We can impinge on the soul of the world (literally, if the world has a soul).[1]

[1] It will be observed that we are far from traditional conceptual analysis here, though the foregoing can be described as conceptual elucidation. It might even be called conceptual poetics—what a poem about knowledge, belief, and perception would look like. Alternatively, it is vernacular description—how our ordinary language would characterize the things in question. It is not uptight. It is impressionistic and imaginative. Its model is not Principia Mathematica but Alice in Wonderland.

Sex and God

There has always been the feeling that there is some sort of tension between sex and God, as if sex were not quite his thing. He turns a blind eye to it, even though he is supposed to have created it. You definitely don’t have sex in church—that would be sinful. It is just about OK in marriage. I want to make a philosophical point, focused on Berkeley’s idealism. According to that view, so-called material objects are ideas in the mind of God—that’s what you see and feel when you deploy your senses. It is also what you act upon when (say) you kick a ball. But that means that when you have sex with someone you are really having sex with an idea in God’s mind; not with God himself, strictly speaking, because God is an infinite spirit not a collection of ideas, but definitely with the contents of his mind. These ideas are his, what constitutes his mental world; presumably, he allows them to be in there. He is complicit in the sex—he consents to it, engages in it. So, we all, animals included, have sex with a part of God. And his ideas also have sex with us: it goes both ways. Isn’t this group sex on a grand scale? Isn’t God amazingly promiscuous? But God can’t be promiscuous; therefore, Berkeley’s idealism must be false. The only way to avoid this conclusion is to claim that God and his ideas are separate things—as if they are just his body distinct from his spirit. But this is crazy. Sex refutes Berkeleyan idealism. The world must exist outside of God.

Sexual Logic

Can we give a sexual account of logical operations? That may sound like a quixotic project, though an enticing one—stimulating, seductive. Quixotic is the word: as in, can’t be done. How could logic be sex? Sancho Panza would warn against it; it’s like that knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail who can’t accept defeat even when his limbs have been cut off (“It’s just a flesh wound”). Sexualizing logic is the holy grail of enlightened biological philosophy, but it looks daunting to put it mildly. At least we should undertake the quest in hopes of rousing adventures, if comical ones. In that spirit, then, I shall imperil myself on the high roads of knightly expedition, offering at least some harmless entertainment along the way. Seriously, though, I am going to propose an identity theory of sex and logic (or something approximating to it). I am going to put sex in the syllogism (note that last syllable). So, hold on to your hats (or other appendages).[1]

Where shall we start (as the actress said to the bishop)? At the endpoint, I suggest: with entailment, logical consequence, deduction. In logic we put together premises in order to derive a conclusion, hoping for validity. We combine premises, let them rub together, and observe the outcome. All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore, Socrates is mortal. The premises have the power to produce the conclusion; they have logical potency. The conclusion resembles the premises, though it isn’t identical to them; it is an intelligible upshot. The premises generate the conclusion; it emerges from their union. They anticipate it and it fulfills their expectations. The OED defines “entailment” thus: “involve (something) as an inevitable part or consequence”, and goes on to cite the legal sense of entailing property over generations (it says nothing of logical entailment specifically). Paraphrasing, we could say that entailment involves a necessary result of other things (it’s close to causation). It is a type of creation, but not from nothing; indeed, the creative origins are already imbued with what results from them. This concept would appear to include both logical entailment, which is allied to deduction, and parental entailment, which is allied to procreation. So: logical consequence is formally like parental consequence. The conclusion of an argument is the baby produced by the parental premises—the two of them combined. The baby produced by a copulating couple is likewise the conclusion of an argument. You can see the baby in the parents and the conclusion in the premises; neither arrives as an unheralded novelty. Yet the result is not reducible to the causes, not identical with them. The idea, then, is that deduction is structurally like procreation; the conceptual format of the one mirrors the conceptual format of the other. The logical notion is built from the genealogical notion; the latter is the precursor to the latter. We think of (mentally represent) entailment by analogy with procreation, trading upon old evolutionary transitions (like scales and feathers). Our concept of entailment is modelled on our concept of procreation: premises mate to give birth to conclusions. There is a kind of genetics of logic (think of it as logical form). The syllogistic form is like the procreative sequence. The cognitive psychology of logical reasoning is akin to the cognitive psychology of procreative reasoning: A and B come together to produce Z. In both cases the outcome follows from the antecedents—temporally and by law. You come to a conclusion by reasoning according to logical laws, and you produce a baby by acting in certain ways (principally copulation) according to biological laws. Logic maps onto sex, conceptually speaking; not by conceptual analysis of the traditional kind but by instantiating the same basic pattern. Logic is a kind of abstract procreation. This connection exists in the basement of the concept: progenitor and progeny, axioms and theorems. In both cases, a certain inevitability applies.[2]

That was entailment; now we must deal with predication. A certain move immediately suggests itself: the copula and copulation. The copula copulates: it joins and fecundates. Logical predication is the counterpart of sexual copulation. It is one thing hooking up with another, fastening itself to another, modifying another. It concatenates and agglomerates. It produces the sentence—the crown jewel of language. It forms the unit that features in logical relations. To predicate is to create a viable unit of meaning—a move in the language game. And this is like a couple coupling, embracing, linking together. Sexual intercourse is a concatenation of bodies. The beast with two backs is made of two sub-beasts, a male and a female. One thing applies itself to the other. Two separate units merge into a higher unit. This is programmed in the genes and hardwired in the brain, in man and animals. We understand the concept of copulation innately and primitively; it provides the basis for understanding the operation of predication (suitably supplemented). Linguistic copulation is structurally analogous to sexual copulation. It is the necessary prelude to procreation and deduction: first copulate, then procreate (or deduce). The elementary predication is a linguistic double-backed beast, ready to generate new offspring (logical entailments). Only predicate (fornicate); then you can and will entail (procreate). The syllogism is pregnant with its conclusion, but the premises have to be assembled first: copulation precedes parturition. Parents give birth to babies; premises give birth to conclusions. A baby is a kind of conclusion to a logical argument. The womb is a syllogistic form waiting for a specific content to be inserted. Thus, predication and deduction have sex written all over them, or into them. In predicating you are copulating; in deducing you are making babies. Sancho Panza is happy with this (though fearful his boss is about go off on an errant errand).

We must now descend to the level of the penis, with the vagina not far behind. These vital organs are about to come into their own logically, to prove their logical worth. Phallocentrically, I will focus on the penis: for we must now address the question of reference, denotation, meaning. Logical arguments need sentences, sentences need words, and words need meaning (reference). How does sex give words meaning? (Sancho trembles.) Isn’t it obvious? By means of erections of course! Do I need to say more? Okay, I will expatiate on the subject of tumescence and sense and reference. Reference is connected to ostension, pointing, bodily orientation. It is reasonable to suppose that reference originated in pointing, and hence in the hand. But the index finger is not the only pointer known to man (and I have men in particular in mind, as well as other male animals). You can point with your elbow and nose and foot. But you can also point with your penis, especially in its erect state. In fact, it makes quite a good pointing instrument: conspicuous, rigid, striking. You can do some effective ostension with that thing. But there is a more fundamental point to be made about penis-pointing: it primarily points at the vagina. That is its primary ostensive target. It even homes in on this target, eventually hooking up with it. It is vagina-oriented, vagina-focused, vagina-dedicated. Moreover, its design is vagina-influenced: it is made to fit the vagina, as the vagina is made to fit it. The two things fit snugly together, as if made for each other (which they are). One mirrors the other; there is an isomorphism between them. You could say: the penis means the vagina—alludes to it, indicates it, refers to it. There is a close internal relation between them, closer than that between the forefinger and its typical referent. The erect penis is thus the clear precursor to linguistic reference—it’s as plain as the nose on your face. For reference is precisely this kind of intimate internal meaningful relation. One could upload the penis (or a mental representation of it) into the linguistic faculty and produce a fair simulacrum of reference as we know it. Erection and denotation go hand in hand. Familiarity with one breeds familiarity with the other. When a name rigidly designates an object the term “rigid” is not inappropriate. It is as if the name has an erection pointed at its bearer! The most primordial type of reference, distributed throughout the animal kingdom, is the penis—pointing rigidly at the relevant part of the female. I mean, that thing really refers—unmistakably, stubbornly. You know exactly what it is pointing at. It is the prototype of the naming relation, the original demonstrative gesture. There could be a tribe that referred onlyby means of the penis. The penis thus refers to the vagina, stands ready to copulate with it, thereby producing lovely babies. Erection, copulation, procreation; reference, predication, deduction: they line up nicely together. (Sancho looks quizzical at this point, but not in fear of his life.) We thus have the outlines of a sexual logic—that holy grail of sexual philosophy. No doubt it will need some tinkering and trouble-shooting, but it looks reasonably robust, and not entirely quixotic.

Boringly, I must append a methodological note. Let’s not caricature sexual logic, please, calling it by names it’s not. It is not intended as an a priori conceptual analysis of entailment, predication, and reference; nor is it offered as an empirical reduction of those notions. Rather, it is intended as a biological theory of the origin of a human faculty: how that faculty came to exist, from what materials, on what basis. It didn’t come from nowhere and it had only antecedent faculties to work with—what the organism was already equipped with. No saltation! Given that sex dominates biology, shaping it from the ground up, we do well to seek sexual precursors and precedents, searching for the biological roots of an adaptation. Logic looks distant from sex at this point in evolutionary and cultural history, but nothing is completely unconnected with sex, even if the connection is quite remote (this is the first law of sexual philosophy). The logical thinker is also a sexual being from head to toe. Sex infiltrates his entire existence. The genitals are never entirely irrelevant. The animal is always cocked to use them, because its mission in life is to procreate. The logical faculty, like the perceptual faculty, is ab initioset up to serve a sexual purpose, and it is natural for it to incorporate sexual elements. It is part of what enables us to reproduce, and it has an architecture that derives ultimately from pre-existing sexual adaptations. Its biological point is sexual and its content incorporates sexual materials. The biological universals of procreation, copulation, and erection are part of its evolutionary heritage. Sexual logic is thus perfectly (bio)logical. Biological adaptations have biological explanations, and sex is central to biological explanations.[3]

[1] Perhaps I should make clear that the logic I am talking about is pre-school logic not textbook logic. It isn’t predicate calculus but folk logic—the basic ability to reason logically. Kids can do it, and dunces, and many animals. It belongs to a basic part of the mind going back eons; I suspect dinosaurs were decent logicians in this sense. It had to arise in them from prior traits, and these traits would have had sexual liaisons.

[2] I have yet to discover an analogue of orgasm in the case of logic, though I suppose we might consider the elation of drawing a conclusion from a well-formed argument. Logic certainly has its addicts and enthusiasts (also perverts: deviant logics). Some people are infatuated with logical symbols. I have never seen any logical pornography, though.

[3] Note that I haven’t discussed specific logical systems; that has not been my concern. My concern has been the logical relation of entailment and the role of premises and conclusions, combined with predication and reference. Logical universals, in effect. It is such universals that can be subsumed under biological categories (more precisely, our grasp of them). The cognitive substructure is sexual in nature. Perhaps if logic were taught with this substructure in mind, it would be met with more enthusiasm from students. Ditto for philosophy in general. Do you think psychology was generally popular before Freud came along? Sexual philosophy is a sure enrollment booster. Sex sells. I could write a popular book on it.