Seeing as Knowing
Knowing may or may not be a type of seeing, but seeing is a type of knowing.[1] I mean this as an identity theory: seeing is knowing. Necessarily, if you see, you know, because seeing is in itself a type of knowing. The knowing isn’t something added to the seeing; it is already present in the seeing. We might speak of visual knowing—along with auditory knowing, tactile knowing, gustatory knowing, olfactory knowing. All the senses deliver knowledge just by acting as senses. Suppose I don’t know where my phone is and undertake a search for it. I see it lying on the bed. Then I know where it is. I don’t need to reason about what I’ve seen or supplement my seeing or validate it in some way: my visual sense has informed me about where my phone is. The OED defines “know” as “be aware of through observation, inquiry, or information” and “have knowledge or information concerning”. I am aware of where my phone is through observation; I am informed of its whereabouts. This knowledge will pass immediately into my memory, there to be stored as an item of information. My senses have functioned normally and successfully to disclose a piece of information concerning reality. They did nothing wrong. I will now remember where my phone is. When I see my phone, I thereby know where it is, because to see is to know. This is primitive sense-based knowledge possessed by adult humans, animals, and children. It isn’t that we first sense and then know, as a causal consequence, perhaps aided by reason; there is no epistemic gap. If we are interested in the seeing-knowing problem, the answer is not dualism but monism: to see just is to know. Seeing is not epistemically neutral, awaiting certification by other cognitive faculties (reason, intellect); it is in itself a form of knowledge.
Why might anyone doubt this piece of elementary common sense? One reason is the alleged connection between knowledge and belief. Knowledge requires belief, but I might not believe my senses, thus undermining knowledge. Suppose I am under the impression that my senses have been deceiving me lately, perhaps because a generally reliable authority has told me so. Recalling this, I start to doubt my senses—am I under the illusion that my phone is on the bed? I now don’t believe I have found my phone, even though I have. But knowledge requires belief, so I don’t have knowledge about the location of my phone after all. The trouble with this argument is that perceptual knowledge does not require this kind of belief: I can know without believing. Suppose I am informed that my erstwhile informant is in fact a liar and my senses have been functioning perfectly; then I will revert to believing I have found my phone. But my visual sense hasn’t changed at all: it has kept on feeding me information about the whereabouts of my phone. I have known the whole time where my phone is; I just didn’t believe this for a short period. I was aware the whole time of certain information; I just doubted it for a while. Thus, I possessed knowledge. Children and animals don’t engage in this kind of belief waffling; they simply know what their senses tell them. The senses convey knowledge of the environment no matter what you believe about them; they function successfully no matter what your opinion of their functioning might be. They don’t care what your opinion of them is; they do their job even if you doubt their veracity. To see is not to believe that you see, but to see. So, the senses deliver knowledge whether you believe they do or not. They are not deterred by your possibly low opinion of them: you don’t become blind by thinking you are, because your eyes are not influenced by your thoughts.
The second reason concerns skepticism. It is important to understand that the skeptic is not claiming that we don’t sense things; his claim is only that we don’t know that we do. The senses are fallible, because of the possibility of illusion and hallucination; but if they are veridical, they convey information and hence knowledge. This the skeptic accepts: if veridical, then knowledgeable. His contention is that we don’t have justified or certain belief that they are veridical. Hence, evil demons, brains in vats, and so on. The point I am making is not intended to combat the skeptic, except in so far as he claims that the senses don’t deliver a kind of knowledge—they do when functioning normally, whether we can know this or not. For all the skeptic says, the senses are continually producing knowledge, whether or not we can justifiably assert this proposition. For the possibility of perceptual knowing is not dependent on refuting the skeptic: we don’t need to prove that they actually convey knowledge, only that their output is knowledge if they are not functioning abnormally. It is in their nature to produce knowledge; knowledge is not something that gets added to them under suitable conditions. The skeptic has no proof that they don’t produce knowledge, since their doing so does not depend on our being able to prove that we have justified belief that they do. He may be able to prove that we have no such justified belief, but that doesn’t show that they don’t actually produce knowledge. Even if reason (intellect) can’t produce knowledge, that doesn’t show that perception can’t. It may be that rational thought can never generate real knowledge but that basic perceptual experience generates it all the time. An outside observer, like God, may look down on us and think, “They are not equipped with the faculties to acquire justified belief about the universe, but they are able to form bits of perceptual knowledge and do so regularly”. Thus, there is no move from skepticism to the denial of perceptual knowledge as such (which is not the same as justified perceptual belief).
Let’s try to see the commonsense wood for the skeptical trees. When an animal uses its senses, which it does all the time, it picks up information about the perceived world. This information is aptly called knowledge. The senses are devices for acquiring knowledge of the environment; they evolved to perform this function. They don’t need to be interpreted or supplemented or processed in order to yield knowledge; they don’t need a separate faculty, typically called reason, to operate on them before knowledge comes into being. This kind of consciousness is a knowing consciousness, intrinsically and essentially. It needs no stamp of approval from a higher authority (as Descartes supposed). You don’t need God to convert the water of sensation into the wine of knowledge; nor do you need logical reasoning or scientific method. Perceptual sensation is alreadyknowledge. The concept of knowledge is not alien to it, or external, or adventitious. An animal that perceives is an animal that knows. We are such an animal (so were dinosaurs and multitudes of other species). There has been knowledge on planet Earth for millions and millions of years. It didn’t take philosophers to make knowledge possible. Knowledge is as old and basic as breathing and defecating. Knowledge must not be intellectualized, as if it is the property of only rational souls (whatever they may be). Knowledge is at least as ancient as consciousness, and both precede logical reasoning and reflection. Knowledge existed long before epistemology ever did.[2]
[1] I am influenced in what follows by the work of Michael Ayers. I skate over many contentious issues here in order to focus on the central point.
[2] I haven’t talked about what such primitive knowledge concerns. It isn’t hard to say: discrete, bounded, solid objects in space, moving about, in varying proximity to the organism’s body—precisely the things of relevance to the survival. In sensing things, the organism comes to know these kinds of facts about what is sensed. This forms the most basic kind of knowledge possessed by knowing beings. All later empirical knowledge is an extension of this basic kind (including the Cogito). We certainly don’t come to know sense-data first, still less the self.
