A New Theory of Knowledge
A New Theory of Knowledge
Knowledge is the conscious impingement of the world on the soul. I don’t think we can do better than this after all these years: it captures the essence. Knowledge is the (conscious) impingement of the world on the soul. These are its conceptual ingredients. Forget true justified belief, or acquaintance, or perception, or certainty: knowledge is to be defined as reality consciously impinging on the soul. I can’t say it any more clearly without sliding into falsehood. The world impinges on the soul, consciously so, and when it does knowledge is the upshot. World, soul, consciousness, impingement—these are the elements that make up the concept of knowledge, neither more nor less.
What is the “soul”? Why did you choose it instead of the “mind”?
Neither of these words is very well defined. To me the soul is more closely connected to the essence of the person or self: a person has a mind but is a soul. The connotation of “soul” includes depths that “mind” does not. Knowledge has value and the soul is supposed to be the center of value; the mind is just a faculty of the soul. But it would be okay to substitute “mind” into the definition (it is a more modern word) according to predilection. We could also say “intellect” or “sensibility” or “psyche” or even “brain”. You might want to take a look at my review of George Makari’s long book Soul Machine on the history of “soul” and “mind” in the NYRB for 2016.
I landed here while reading your chapter in “Consciousness and its Place in Nature” after finding that you weren’t listed in the contributors page. And then I saw that you were at UCL when I was. That brought back memories of John Watling striding about his office declaiming on the nature of knowledge. And then I saw this blog post, all these years . . .
Good old Johnny Watling, a lively and extremely unproductive philosopher.
In your definition, you treat reality, soul, impingement, and consciousness as the basic ingredients of knowledge. But that invites a question: can there be an impingement of reality on the soul that is not conscious?
If yes, what is that supposed to be: a non-conscious impingement of reality on the soul? Is it a genuine phenomenon that simply isn’t knowledge (e.g. a non-self-aware feeling, a blind causal affection, something like that)?
And if that distinction is allowed, then what is consciousness doing in your account of knowledge: is it something extra and irreducible added to impingement—a moment of manifestation or “showing-up” (an appearing-as), not captured by impingement alone. Or can it be defined reflexively in the terms you’re already using—i.e. “the impingement on the soul of the reality of an impingement of reality impinging on the soul”? Admittedly this last option collapses consciousness into just conscious knowledge.
We do speak of unconscious knowledge, but there are several replies to that as an objection, which it would be tedious to spell out here: distinguish primary from secondary knowledge (a la Michael Ayers), regard the unconscious as derivative from the conscious, relax the definition to include the unconscious soul or mind, deny that we literally have unconscious knowledge (it’s just a manner of speaking). I think my simple formulation is the best.
What does this definition tell us about memory ie if it is to be treated as a form of knowledge? What form of world-impingement is involved?
Yes, memory is a type of knowledge. The impingement occurred in the past to lay down the memory trace.
When the madeleine unlocks a memory, what reality (in addition to the present madeleine) is impinging in that moment: just brain activity, or does the soul have an imprint of the past within it (a kind of potential or latent reality within itself)?
The soul does have an imprint within it, a memory trace (engram)–a state of the brain. The past has impinged on the soul (brain).
Let’s susppose your theory of knowledge is right and is plausible but you can;t quite prove it and compel your peers by a positive proof; but you can disprove all the alternatives. Does that count as proof?
It would if it were possible, but in philosophy there is no such thing as a proof in the sense you intend. However, it is possible to feel, correctly, that one has got to the heart of something, as in this theory of knowledge.
This may sound weak, but when we perceive things in the world the impression made is tainted by our past perceptions and by the proclivity of our so called soul, is it not? Probably obvious, you must have a way around it. I do see your epistemology as jibing with your mysterianism, how can we have impressions of our selves in the same way as of others?
All causal relations (impingements) are like that; it doesn’t mean one thing doesn’t cause changes in another. We do impinge on ourselves–we call it “introspection”. I’m surprised no one is asking me about knowledge of the future and numbers–do they impinge on the soul?
Why not the conscious impingement of the soul on the world?
That would be action rather than knowledge. My theory is like the causal theory of knowledge in this respect.
I think you’ve got it backwards. The soul is the world. And knowledge is consciousness impinging upon it.
It that were so, knowledge would never look beyond the soul, since solipsism would be true (if there is only your own soul). And consciousness would have to be distinct front the soul, but how can that be? No, knowledge is of something other than the soul, viz. the world, which impinges on consciousness (affects it). Still, I welcome your formulation as a rival theory. These are the right terms to be thinking in (remote from contemporary epistemology).
Knowledge looks beyond the soul — to the noumenal realm — and finds nothing. Consciousness is distinct from the soul as reason is distinct from intuition. Consciousness is the soul’s self-image — the soul trying to understand itself by creating a representation of itself within itself.
So the soul knows nothing but itself–hardly an accepted view. Consciousness is obviously a part of the soul, indeed its central part. I am talking mainly about perceptual knowledge of the external world as impingement (though the soul can impinge on itself, as when you know you are in pain). If you change the metaphysics, you change the epistemology.
The soul knows everything but itself. That’s why it has to create a self-image: a representation of itself within itself. That, in turn, creates a paradox of recursion that turns out to be the basis of virtually every paradox philosophers have discovered. And, as Kant showed, before the soul/world can impinge upon you, you have to impinge upon it. There is no “sense data.” The world doesn’t come pre-individuated. You have to draw the lines yourself.
To impinge on something a thing has to cause an effect in it. The physical world has effects on the mind, but the mind has no effects on it, save through action. How we conceive the world is partly dependent on our minds, but physical reality is not an effect of the mind. That is realism. If we think that the world is created by the mind, we are idealists–the world becomes our fiction. My theory of knowledge assumes realism.
Realism is just a version of dualism. It’s the appearance/reality distinction codified. But that distinction makes no sense (aren’t appearances in reality? And how do you discover reality except through appearances?). And causation is just how we represent the soul/world. You take an event, temporally bifurcate it, call the “before” part the cause and the “after” part the effect.
I don’t agree with a word of this.
For that to be the case you’d have to understand it. And in philosophy that’s a victory.
I think I understand it–indeed it is a familiar line of thought–I just don’t agree with it.
So you think there’s a mind-independent fact of the matter about when a cause ends and an effect begins, where one object ends and another begins, where one action ends and another action begins? So you’re probably an epistemicist about vagueness (i.e. a mysterian).
I’m not seeing the relevance of vagueness to the question of realism. My post wasn’t about realism. If you want to know my views on that, I suggest you look up what I have written on it. On this blog the articles on subjective and objective might be useful.
I like it! Just one quibble. The sentence, “Knowledge is the conscious impingement of the world on the soul.” seems to grasp a reality in the world (“the conscious impingement of the world on the soul”) and says, “This is what we’re trying to understand when we say we’re trying to understand “knowledge”. But knowledge (“conscious impingement”) belongs to the soul, not the world, and the picture presented seems to assume a passive subject (the soul). One property of knowledge, “the upshot”, (you may dispute this) is that it involves a reciprocal relation with the world, which would require an active subject. And the impingement and the grasping is an open-ended process, not a one-time event. (And we do want a causal analysis of the phenomenon of knowledge.) So how about, “Knowledge is the conscious grasp of the world by the soul, for a purpose.”? (Perhaps in response to a prior impingement from the world.) (Also, the picture of the soul seems to involve only a single individual, rather than, say, a speech community or humanity as a whole.) (You mentioned Piaget in one of your other posts; he used to use the term ‘epistemic subject’ when he wanted to make observations about what is common to all beings in the position of “subject”.) However, maybe my offering has too much specificity, and you were offering more of a poetic image. But didn’t action and life appear in the universe at the same point? Did Schroedinger address that question?
I think that knowledge can be passive, as in ordinary seeing: seeing is not “subject to the will”, as Wittgenstein puts it. Knowing is not an intentional action. It can just happen to you. Nor is it inherently social or purposeful, though it can be. Knowing is an effect of being.
In the case of “ordinary seeing” my hypothesis (and I don’t think this is the conventionally accepted view, but I think there is psych research to support it) is that the interpretation of the environment as meaningful vs puzzle-evoking is carried out continuously, as long as one is awake, below the level of explicit consciousness, independently of the conscious will, by “the activity of the categories”. And the categories are the same as the ones built up through using the language of the speech community, that the speech community has built up over historical time, for making sense of the world. I agree that knowing is not necessarily the result of intentional action. I like the image; I have no problem with “soul”, “world”, “impingement” and “conscious” (although for the latter, I think it should be clarified just what is involved in the phenomenon of the soul being conscious of the impingement from the world (if that’s what the phrase “conscious impingement of the world” is taken to mean), as in the case just mentioned of “ordinary seeing” vs purposeful making out of something.) The only problem I had was that the phenomenon of purposeful adaptive action seemed to be left out of the picture. I think it’s important, especially to the process of trying to gain an understanding of the world, but, OK, maybe not a necessary feature for everything that is known.
I think the phenomenon of action is important, however, for trying to understand, for example, the internal structure of the propositional schemata (and that’s not as Strawson, et al. analyzed it), and I would like to include the social level because I think the principles of scientific truth-seeking should be seen as logically subordinate to ethical principles. But these things are beyond that fundamental picture you presented. (The latter dimension, e.g., seems to be lacking from the operations of the very large corpus robots called “AI”, so look out for problems arising.)
It’s good to keep the definition as simple and broad as possible qua definition. Of course, knowledge has many other properties that are worth mentioning. Thought, by the way, is active, like judgement; but one cannot decide to know (or believe).
Right. ‘Know’ and ‘believe’ typically refer to static situations; you have to “try to find out” if p is the case; or to “accept p as a hypothesis”, or “conclude that p is the case”. “Thought” implies that a previous act of thinking has been performed; likewise, “judgement” participates in the well-known process-product ambiguity (“act of judgement” vs “that judgement is false”). (Maybe it would be more accurate to say, e.g., “”He was lost in thinking while the lamb chops burned.”) I used to say ‘”thought in Frege’s sense”‘ to distinguish Frege’s logical level object from a psych- level object that Frege usually used the word ‘idea’ to refer to, but I came to realize that it’s not so easy to identify just what a thought is for Frege (You mentioned his “Thought” article). Sorry to get all linguistic on you. But I wonder, what is the explanation for the existence of this process/product distinction? Sometimes it’s reflected in the derivational morphology, and sometimes it’s not.
When knowledge is acquired the world imposes itself on you–it calls the shots. It isn’t a freely chosen act. Hence impingement. But it is a process or event or change or transformation. Of course, you can intentionally act so as to acquire knowledge, but in the end it is not a matter of free choice. Knowledge is subject to the world not the will. That is the core of my definition.
“Knowledge is subject to the world not the will. That is the core of my definition.” I’ve always held that to be the way it works, but I’ve never seen the idea expressed in just that way. And that’s why I preferred “soul” in your original formulation, not “mind”. “You with the will, get out of the way!”
The business with “justified true belief” is so boring, but useful in certain situations. But it can’t be used to say what knowledge is in its essential features. There’s no mention of “world”, or that the world “calls the shots”. It reminds me of a gripe I always have with Chomsky. He’s fond of saying things like, “Language is a system for the expression of thought”. But, I always say, language is mainly a system for the expression of thought about the world. But he never has anything at all to say about thought or about how it relates to the world for the people who use language to express it. (And I “blame” Carnap for that (and his misguided quest for certainty).) My area is description of African languages, and people write big grammars of African languages on Chomskyan principles that are completely useless if you’re interested in how the languages these speech communities use understand the world in ways that are different from European languages. It’s frustrating to see people take these exercises as the be-all-end-all. (As far as I know, nobody so far has discovered the conceptual resources to pursue these questions of how different language systems understand the world effectively. So that’s why I look to philosophy.) Anyway, thanks for responding to my curious musings. I’ve found it quite useful. (BTW, I’ve just noticed that in the first sentence in the parenthetical remark just above, the word “effectively” is doing “double duty”. So I want that ambiguous sentence to express both of its interpretations at once.)
I think you have grasped the essence of my new theory, as contrasted with the old true justified belief definition. I prefer “soul” too. For some reason Chomsky doesn’t like the idea that language and thought are about the world.
This “theory” of knowledge sounds very much like the good old “dormitive virtue of opium.” 2500+ years of philosophy to get there?!
Completely wrong: the theory doesn’t say knowledge is having a cognitive virtue; it constructs the concept from a bunch of separate concepts. There is nothing circular about it. It is, however, intuitively obvious, as a good theory should be. I don’t think you know much about philosophy. Also, it isn’t a dormative theory of opium, whatever that might be, but a dormative theory of having a soporific quality.
For one, it *is* completely circular. What is consciousness if not knowing that there is something here and now that is affecting me in some way? And then you define knowledge as “conscious” impingement. Second, the point in the reference to the “dormitive virtue of opium” was not so much circularity as the fact that it is a totally vacuous explanation. At best, you are giving a mere nominal definition of knowledge, but what have we learnt with that? I may know not much about philosophy, but I am not missing out much if that’s all philosophers have to contribute.
You obviously know nothing about the history of attempts to define knowledge. A definition is by definition nominal. Psychologists can tell you about the empirical facts of knowledge. Consciousness is not the same as knowledge, since you can be conscious of illusory states of affairs. There is nothing vacuous about the definition; indeed, there are potential counterexamples to it. I am not going to give you any more elementary tutorials.
I wouldn’t count on you to give me tutorials since you obviously know nothing about elementary distinctions such as the difference between nominal definition (definition of a term) and real definition (definition explaining the nature of a thing). And I didn’t say that consciousness is the same as knowledge, I only pointed out that your “theory” either is circular if one includes knowing in the definition of consciousness, or is purely verbal (like the dormitive virtue) if you appeal to consciousness as an unexplained fact.
On the contrary, I have a whole book on definition (Truth by Analysis) and I studied Locke on the B.Phil with Michael Ayers. I appeal to that distinction often in my work. You are forgetting that nominal essence can be real essence, as any dictionary will tell you. And if we don’t need to appeal to knowledge in the definition of consciousness, no circulatory will arise there. I am wondering what kind of philosophical education you have had.