Self-consciousness is a rather shaky term with many different meanings which often depend on each other, e.g. notions like self-awareness, self-knowledge, self-recognition, sense of ownership etc. (cf. Frank 1994, Bermúdez, Marcel & Eilan 1995). Self-consciousness is not a single ability or property but a complex entanglement of different features creating a special kind of knowledge. As a premise, it is assumed here that self-consciousness does not come ready-made into existence, but bootstraps itself with the help of other minds in a complex interplay of the infant with the social and physical environment starting from inborn dispositions. It depends on perspectivity due to entered information acquisition, bodily awareness due to proprioception and feedback from results of one's own actions (including the experience of resistance). These are crucial ingredients for a higher-order form of self-consciousness, i.e. I-consciousness. It is conceptualizable and verbalizable. It is based on a feature which is called a self-model. This is an episodically active representational entity (e.g. a complex activation pattern in a human brain), the contents of which are properties of the system itself. It is embedded and constantly updated in a global model of the world created also by the brain based on perceptions, memories, innate informations etc. (Metzinger 1993). Self-models are limited in a crucial way. They cannot represent their own representations as their own representations as their own representations and so on ad infinitum. But there is (or at least was) also no need for that. From an evolutionary perspective, it would have been quite disadvantageous for our ancestors to forget their physical and social environments and plunge into a self-amplifying spiral of self-reflection. Hence, there is a – probably hard-wired – self-referential opacity: The phenomenal mental models employed by our brains are semantically transparent, i.e. they do not contain the information that they are models on the level of their content (Van Gulick 1988). Possibly these phenomenal mental models are activated in such a fast and reliable way that the brain itself is not able to recognize them as such anymore because of a lower temporal resolution of meta representational processes due to limited temporal and physical resources. If so, the system "looks through" its own representational structures as if it were in direct and immediate contact with their contents, creating a special sort of self-intimacy. This leads us to a rather dramatic – and possibly offending – hypothesis: We are systems which are not able to recognize their self-model as a self-model. For this reason we are permanently operating under the conditions of a "naive-realistic self-misunderstanding". We experience ourselves as being in direct and immediate epistemic contact with ourselves. Hence, we are systems which permanently confuse themselves with their own self-model (Metzinger 1996). In doing this, we generate an ego-illusion, which is stable, coherent, and cannot be transcended on the level of conscious experience itself.
Another controversial issue is the problem of free will ( Honderich 1988, O'Connor 1995, Walter 1998)). To define free will in the strongest sense, Libertarians often presume three necessary conditions which, taken together, are sufficient: intelligibility, freedom, and origination. Intelligibility means that a person's free choices are based on intelligible reasons. Freedom means that this person can make different choices under completely identical conditions, i.e. that this person could act otherwise even if all natural laws and boundary conditions (including his or her own physical states) are the same. Origination means that the person is able to create his or her choices and acts according to these choices in a nonphysical way. But this presupposes an ontology (e.g. a kind of dualism or idealism) which goes beyond and is at least partly independent of the physical world. However, even such an ontology won't offer what Libertarians want, for it cannot avoid the dilemma of plunging into an infinite regress or abruptly step on the brake at a mysterious causa sui. This is because in order for me to be truly or ultimately responsible for how I am, so that I am truly responsible for what I want and do (at least in certain respects), something impossible has to be true: There has to be a starting point in the series of acts that made me have a certain nature – a beginning that constitutes an act of ultimate self-origination. But there is no such starting point. Therefore, even if I can act as I please, I can't please as I please. That is not to say that there are no higher-order volitions, for instance wanting to want not to stay that lazy anymore. But ultimately my reasons, beliefs and volitions are non- (our sub-)consciously determined – by earlier experiences, heredity, physiology or external influences – and therefore not ultimately up to me. Thus, in order to be ultimately autonomous and responsible, one would have to be the ultimate cause of onself, or at least of some crucial part of oneself (Strawson 1986). But this would strangely promote man to something like an Aristotelian God, a prime mover. (This is no polemic exaggeration but what Libertarians have actually conceded, see e.g. Chisholm 1964, Kane 1989)
However, there is no hint for the existence of humans as prime movers and nonphysical forces interacting with our physical world through causal loopholes. Nevertheless we do conceive ourselves, at least sometimes, as being free. We have the feeling that it is up to us to decide between alternatives. This feeling depends on second-order emotions (without which we cannot act and choose in complex situations despite of rationality), an intentional stance, a "healthy" (non-deprived) development, non-predictability or epistemic indeterminism (that is to say we cannot know the future for certain, and especially not our own future), rationality (the ability to reflect and reason), planning (and hence higher-order thoughts, a concept of the future et cetera), higher-order volitions, and sanity. These features are compatible with a naturalistic world view (Vaas 1996 & 1999) and even with determinism. Therefore it is not to deny a weaker form of free will. But this does not imply the existence of the kind of freedom and origination for which Libertarianism is argueing. The Libertarian will still insist that our subjective impression of freedom be a powerful argument for free will. Thus, a sceptic should be able to explain such an impression within a naturalistic framework. And this is what an evolutionary perspective might achieve: Ascribing intentional states to others necessarily includes ascribing volitions to them and assuming that they have the power to transfer their volitions into actions somehow, because this is the only way to get advantages from the intentional stance at all. For, if other beings are thought to have intentions but they would be causally inert, that is to say their behaviour has nothing to do with their volitions, this ascription of intentions and hence volitions simply wouldn't matter. However the intentional stance is not an irrelevant luxury. It is a powerful tool to get along with the complexity of the social world and even an anthropomorphically-conceived nonsocial world (up to highly restricted activities – e.g. in playing computer chess nowadays it is common and helpful to think and act as if the computer "wants" and "plans" something). Individuals endowed with this tool are better prepared for the struggle of social life. And it is advantageous to assume the volitions of others as somehow being independent of the environment or the past. Not absolutely independent of course, but in an approximate sense – because this makes it a lot easier to deal with them due to the fact that complex organisms can act (or react) quite differently in similar circumstances and quite similar in very different circumstances. There is another reason to take a concept of volition as revolutionarily advantageous, and this is just the other side of the coin: To deal with other individuals in a complex way means also to plan one's own actions carefully and evaluate their effects. This presupposes some kind of awareness of one's own volition, hence a concept of will and self. Higher-order representations also take one's own mental states into account – not only for decisions and follow-up analyses but also as a parameter in the plans of others regarding oneself. Thus, it is reasonable or even necessary to ascribe volitions to oneself, too – because otherwise one cannot reason about the mental states of others who are presumably dealing with oneself. This makes one's own volitions explicit – and much more flexible. For instance, an individual may think: "She believes that I want to do this, and she will react to this in a certain way to get an advantage over me – and therefore I will act otherwise and not do this but that." At least since the point from which there has been language with an inbuilt grammatical structure distinguishing between subjects and objects, active and passive, present and future – but probably much earlier –, such concepts of volition, actions and self-notions have been flourishing. This was not only the case in contexts of cheating, however! In the course of time co-operation became more and more important among our early ancestors. And the existence of some form of language already implies a high degree of co-operation (Calvin & Bickerton 2000) – spoken language would never have emerged unless most people, most of the time, followed conventional usage. But co-operation in complex, not inherited forms also presupposes an intentional stance and the capacity to ascribe volitions to others.
Finally, evolution shaped our minds respectively our brains to cope with our complex social lives. We are forced by our very nature to interact with other people in a fundamentally different way than to interact with, say, stones and sticks (Strawson 1962). From this it is no longer a big step to a notion of free will which is a powerful tool to act in consonance with or opposition to others and to establish some kind of moral responsibility – a very effective way to influence the behaviour of others and justify punishments. Thus, free will even succeeded to become an entity of religious, philosophical or political theories and a postulate for jurisdiction. Of course we need not dismiss an intentional and personal stance. It is, obviously, crucial for our survival. We cannot leave our subjective standpoints, turning exclusively to an objective, perspectiveless view. We may accept that we have, ultimately, no free choice. Nevertheless, in our everyday life we think and act as if we did. Even sceptical philosophers do – or they might find themselves out of the race quickly. Nature is stronger than insight and "the human brain is, in large part, a machine for winning arguments, a machine for convincing others that its owner is in the right – and thus a machine for convincing its owner of the same thing. The brain is like a good lawyer: given any set of interests to defend, it sets about convincing the world of their moral and logical worth, regardless of whether they in fact have any of either. Like a lawyer, the human brain wants victory, not truth; and, like a lawyer, it is sometimes more admirable for skill than for virtue" (Wright 1994),
As Labov (1977) noted,"one of the most human thing that human beings do is talk to one another. we can refer to this activity as conversation,discourse, or spoken interaction." As "one of the most human things" which we do, it stands to reason that meaning is often assumed to be shared during verbal interaction. However, we know that words are laden with symbolic meaning in addition to being tools for the simple sharing of information or experience. A critical point is that each of us differs in terms of our information and experience, and despite the ideal of having a "standard language"-- even among people speaking the same dialect of the same language, or being truly "bilingual"--the fact is that each of us on this planet adds our own nuance to words, or phrases, or intonation, or some combination thereof.
Sociologists, social psychologists, and others study the effects of such ubiquitous experience as exposure to the language of television, of political campaigns, and of newspaper headlines. Advertisers know that many people suspend their "truth filters" for 30-second segments at a time. Psychoanalysts routinely explored "distortion" of communication, in expressing and receiving facts, fantasies, and associated experiences which carry a mutually-understood "meaning". Those reading this paper online will surely recognize that one may well get quizzical responses to comments made about one's "mouse" or being involved in a "fatal crash"
Discourse is dependent on both the context of the conversation, in "real time", and the overwearied vocabularies which are acquired over the course of social, professional, and vocational training. In other words, we communicate to some extent using a vocabulary contained in the scripts of our daily lives and daily experiences.
Freud, nearing the end of his life, and holding his first and only seminar in America, was asked for the secret of happiness, and (in German, paraphrased here), answered "Work and Love". The drives. But while Freud was best known for his interpretation of the "love" portion of that formula, the "work" portion of life is perhaps more amenable to systematic study and is also quite interesting to examine.
One's work experiences are where a great deal of our vocabulary and communication skills come from, and sometimes even our relational styles. Our workday shapes our thoughts and sets our neurons ablaze even as we are dreaming or trying to express with a loved one the trials and tribulations of our work day. Knowledge of one's use of language as a tool is knowledge of a great deal more.
In fact, we each may be speaking a different dialect of the same language, as doctors and lawyers and beauticians and homemakers and teachers and software engineers all take for granted that we are processing words and meaning in the same way. Consider, however, how we may hear "computerese" spoken in a corporate lunchroom, the latest news from Paris haute couture spoken while strolling through Bloomingdales, and self-referential, psychoanalytically-derived reverie from the student of clinical psychology. Are they speaking the same language?
How does one's vocabulary and learned way of associating words to meaning affect the way one thinks and communicates across a range of situations? How will the course of psychotherapy, which is heavily dependent on verbal representation and interaction, be affected by one's linguistic disposition and the world view this may represent (or reinforce)? These sort of broad questions will be the focus of the present paper. It maybe anticipated that many more questions will be raised than answered, but this is not seen as necessarily being a bad thing.
To what extent can we say that a speaker knows rule R of his or her language rather than rule R', given that both rules produce the same grammatical outcome? If rule R' provides a more general, technically precise formulation of the same conditions formulated by rule R, do we ascribe knowledge of R' to the speaker - even if the speaker admits only to knowing R? Assuming that a third-person report drawing on the best available theory should take precedence over the speaker's own first-person report, Chomsky claims we can and should ascribe knowledge of the more precise rule to the speaker. I argue that while the third-person reports offered by observers drawing on the best available theories provide standards by which a given behaviour may be evaluated, corresponding first-person accounts must be taken into consideration as criteria of assertibility constraining what we may conclude about the person's actual knowledge.
Given the following two choices: [A] I often read the newspaper on Sunday. [B] I read often the newspaper on Sunday. Which is a native English speaker-- call him or her S -- most likely to produce? It should be fairly obvious that he or she would likely produce the grammatically correct sentence A. What may not be so obvious is his or her reason for choosing A over B.
[2] Chomsky explains the choice by citing the speaker's knowledge of the appropriate rule. In rejecting the grammatically incorrect sentence B, Chomsky claims, speaker S shows that he or she "knows that verbs cannot be separated from their objects by adverbs". Call this "rule R." But because he holds that the prohibition of such adverbial intervention is a consequence of the more general rule of strict adjacency, Chomsky goes further and claims that what S really knows is that "the value for the case assignment parameter in E is strict adjacency" emphasis in the original). Call this "rule R'." Both rule R and rule R' describe S's behaviour. But are we justified in claiming that S in fact knows rule R'?
[3] It would be helpful first of all to clarify what Chomsky means by knowing a rule. Extrapolating from behavioural evidence, Chomsky claims (with some more or less weak provisos, e.g., that if a speaker's utterances conform to the conditions specified by a language rule, then that speaker knows the rule. In short, a speaker who observes a rule can be said to know that rule. In addition, Chomsky claims that knowing a rule of language is an instance of knowing-that, and therefore involves propositional knowledge. Thus according to Chomsky, if S acts in accordance with rule R of his or her language, then S knows rule R and therefore knows that R.
[4] Chomsky's claim that knowledge of language is knowing-that has an important corollary. That is that the person who knows rule R not only knows that R, but believes that R (e.g., Ascription of knowledge of language to a person therefore entails a corresponding ascription of belief to that person. When we state that someone knows a language rule, we are in effect making a statement about his or her attitude (belief) toward the propositional content embodying the language rule.
[5] It seems to me that in cases in which knowledge of language is ascribed, we are justified in recasting talk about knowledge into talk about beliefs. That is because what interests us is not whether or not a given rule is true, i.e., whether or not it accurately describes the appropriate language behaviour, but rather, whether or not it is considered true of his or her language by the speaker. Our ascription of knowledge of the given language rule thus involves a statement about S, specifically, about how things are with him or her as demonstrated by his or her attitude toward the relevant proposition(s). For that reason, framing the question in terms of S's beliefs is perfectly legitimate, and shows exactly what is at stake when we ascribe knowledge of language to a person.
[6] On the basis of the foregoing, I would suggest that for any language rule R, knowing that R means the following: We can say that S knows R if S believes the propositions comprising R. If R can be stated as p, then S knows R if S believes that p. Further, for S to believe that p is for S to be disposed normally to feel/hold/agree that p.
[7] Applying this to the example introduced at the beginning of this paper, we would say that S's knowing R means that S believes that verbs cannot be separated from their objects by adverbs.
[8] By the same token, S's knowing R' means that S believes that the value for the case assignment parameter in E is strict adjacency.
[9] Further, if we claim that S produces sentence A and not sentence B because S knows that R, we are in effect asserting that S's producing A comes about by virtue of S's cognitive/doxastic state having a certain content. Or: S believes that R and because S believes that R, S utters A rather than B
10] The general claim here is that language behaviour takes the form it does by virtue of the content of the cognitive/doxastic state that enters into/supports/underlies that behaviour. Conversely, the actual content of that cognitive/doxastic state would represent the speaker's knowledge of language and would explain why he or she produces the appropriate utterances.
[11] Given the above definition of what it is to know, and the connection between the content of a cognitive/doxastic state and the role it plays in the explanation of behaviour, the question becomes: Which formulation of a rule describes the speaker's actual belief(s), and which formulation simply describes a set of conditions to which the speaker's behaviour (unknowingly) conforms?
[12] Chomsky offers an answer that can be called the argument from the best theory. He states that [W] are entitled to propose that the rule R is a constituent element of Jones's language (I-language) if the best theory we can construct dealing with all relevant evidence assigns R as a constituent element of the language abstracted from Jones's attained state of knowledge)
[13] Chomsky's argument is that if our best theory for explaining a speaker's behaviour includes attributing to him or her knowledge of a given rule, then we should conclude that this knowledge does in fact enter into the speaker's behaviour and that the speaker therefore does know the rule. Implicit in this argument is the provision that a third person attribution of knowledge of language has authority over a first person report, if the third-person attribution is made on the basis of the best possible theory available. From this point of view, the third-person claim that another person's language behaviour implicates a given cognitive/doxastic content is true simply by virtue of the claim's having been derived from the best available theory. Because it is derived from the best available theory, the third-person attribution must take precedence over any relevant first-person account.
[4] But this does not tell us whether or not S knows rule R in the required sense of believing that R. It does not, in other words, tell us whether or not S holds the requisite attitude - belief - in relation to the propositions and constituent concepts embodying the rule he or she is said to know. This is what we need to ascertain, but how?
[15] It is informative to note in this regard a point that Searle has raised in general objection to Chomsky's claim that speakers are (actually, in fact) following the rules he and other grammarians have formulated. According to Searle, for any attribution of rule-following, we need to show that the attributed rules are "rules that the agent is actually following, and not mere hypotheses or generalizations that correctly describe his behaviour." For Searle, the argument from the best theory does not suffice, since the descriptive or predictive accuracy of the attributed rule does not by itself prove that the rule is in fact being followed. We need, instead, "some independent reason for supposing that the rules are functioning causally"
[16] There seem to be two points bundled into Searle's objection. The first, which Searle explicitly makes, is that behaviour which seems to be in accord with a rule must be shown to be guided by that rule in fact and not simply hypothetically. More generally, if we are to claim that a person is behaving in a certain way on account of his or her given cognitive/motivational content, we must show that this given cognitive/motivational content does in fact enter into the production of the behaviour in the specified manner.
[17] The second point, which Searle doesn't make but which I find implicit in the call for obtaining an independent reason for attributing a rule, is that the person to whom such rule following is attributed should (somehow) understand him or herself to be following the rule. This would mean (among other things) that he or she should show evidence of believing that R, for the given attributed rule R. Such evidence could be found in the appropriate first-person avowal of belief or acceptance that R; such a first-person avowal would in fact constitute an independent reason for attributing actual, as opposed to hypothetical, rule-following to that person, if we read "independent" to mean something like "coming from a source other than the person doing the attributing." Like the previous point, this point can be generalized. Given cases in which it is claimed that a speaker knows a given rule of language, we would want independent corroboration of that claim.
[18] A common sense attempt to corroborate a knowledge claim would have us solicit a first person report from the speaker him- or herself. We might, for instance, ask the speaker to describe what, if any, language rule he or she understands him- or herself to be following in producing a given utterance. With this evidence, we would be able to determine whether or not our hypothesized ascription of rule-following (and with it the corresponding ascription of belief) is accurate.
[19] This first approach would require the speaker to be able to convey to us on his or her own why his or her language behaviour exhibits the regularity observed of it. But there are prima facie two problems here. First, it seems clear that not all speakers can formulate the rules their language behaviour seems to conform to, and second, not all speakers are aware of their reasons for producing utterances in the form that they do.
[20] But neither of these considerations should be taken to mean that S necessarily cannot give us the kind of testimony we would want. In the first place, the inability to state or otherwise express a rule is not necessarily evidence that one does not know (or would not recognize) the rule any more than the inability to describe a concept is evidence that one does not know (would not recognize) the concept. And in the second place, one's not being aware of one's reasons for behaving in a given way is not necessarily evidence that one does not know why one behaved in the given way. Many actions do not ordinarily require a high degree of attentiveness to the conditions of their production in order to succeed. This is obviously true of performances based on, e.g., physical skills, which often require little or no attentive monitoring for their success. But it is also true of more formalized behaviours, language performances among them. For example, a speaker may concentrate attention on what he or she is saying and apparently not think about the syntactic conditions his or her utterance must meet. And yet afterward the speaker may acknowledge that he or she did indeed mean to conform to the appropriate syntactic rule. In any case, it seems reasonable to suppose that a speaker initially inattentive to the reasons behind his or her syntactic behaviour can at least in principle become aware of them and may impart that awareness to others. The question is how.
[21] On the face of it, at least, introspection would appear to be the most obvious way for the speaker to gain such awareness, since what we are concerned with here are psychological facts which, one would think, could be discovered through one's focussing attention on one's own inner states. But Chomsky rejects introspection, claiming that it can tell the introspector neither that the given rule holds nor that the rule enters into the appropriate "mental computations" involved in language production.
[22] But introspection does not exhaust all possible avenues for securing the kind of first-person evidence we would want to obtain. We could state the rule we think S is following, and ask S whether or not he or she would accept this as the correct description of the reason he or she produced the given utterance. We could likewise present S with different formulas presenting under different descriptions the same linguistic regularity observed of S, and ask him or her to choose which one correctly describes his or her understanding of why he or she conformed to that regularity. We might, to return to our previous example, show S rules R and R', and ask him or her which one, if any, describes his or her understanding of why sentence A is preferable to sentence B. No matter which specific approach would be taken, the crucial criterion would be that ascription to S of knowledge of a rule be contingent upon S's recognizing and agreeing to the propositions contained in the rule.
[23] Thomas Nagel has in fact suggested something like this. As he puts it, So long as it would be possible with effort to bring the speaker to a genuine recognition of a grammatical rule as an expression of his understanding of the language, rather than to a mere belief, based on the observation of cases, that the rule in fact describes his competence, it is acceptable, in that to think, would indeed ascribe knowledge of that rule to the speaker. emphasis in the original).
An ascription of knowledge to a person should be contingent upon the acceptance by that person of the appropriate propositions and/or concepts as accurately articulating what he or she believes.
[24] Generally, we can ascribe belief B to S if S, when B is brought to his or her attention, feels/holds/agrees that B. Without S's feeling/holding/agreeing that B, we could not confidently ascribe B to S. In addition, S's feeling/holding/agreeing that B can consist in the recognition that B or the acquisition of the attitude that B
[25] Thus for S to accept that rule R correctly reflects what he or she knows about the appropriate aspect of language, S must either recognize that R or acquire the belief that R. If S were to recognize that R, then S would simply be exercising an already-existing disposition to normally hold/feel/agree that R, given the appropriate circumstances. If S were to acquire the belief that R, then S would, on the basis of, e.g., evidence presented, become disposed to hold/feel/agree that R is the case, given the appropriate circumstances. In other words, when we recognize that R, we are exercising or expressing a belief we already have, though perhaps we never had the need or opportunity to do so before. When we are brought to accept that R, we are acquiring, and consequently expressing, the belief that R. Note that in either case, the acceptance condition involves a first-person avowal of belief.
[26] Note also that it is not necessary that the speaker come to this avowal through reflection or "introspection" or otherwise on his or her own. If a rule is described to the speaker, and the speaker agrees that he or she believes (or is brought to believe) that the rule holds in the appropriate circumstance, then it is reasonable to attribute to him or her knowledge of that rule. But it is also true that if the speaker does not recognize or accept the rule as articulating something he or she believes or has come to believe, then the plausible attribution to him or her of knowledge of that rule would be difficult to maintain.
[27] Would Chomsky agree to make the ascription of knowledge of language rules contingent on the acceptance condition? On the one hand, he seems to accept a scenario in which a speaker comes to know the rules of grammar "from the outside" - that is, by having them taught or otherwise brought to his or her attention by another party. On the other hand, his position on the usefulness of the first-person perspective generally is that it isn't. His view seems to be based not only on his own belief that much knowledge of language is tacit, but on the widely recognized observation that first-person accounts are inherently unreliable. If we examine these two points, however, we will find that, rather than invalidating the first-person perspective altogether, they serve only to qualify the claims that can be made for it.
[28] If, as Chomsky claims, knowledge of language is largely tacit, then claims regarding a speaker's knowledge of a given rule may be a difficult matter to decide from the speaker's point of view. Given Chomsky's understanding of tacit knowledge as knowledge that is "generally inaccessible to consciousness" and therefore presumably opaque to the knower, it is easy to see how it would be difficult to make knowledge ascription contingent on the appropriate first-person avowal. But this difficulty may be more apparent than real.
[29] First, tacit knowledge as Chomsky understands it would appear to differ very little from ordinary knowledge outside of its being tacit., Chomsky does not claim that a speaker's tacit knowledge of language is inferentially isolated from his or her other attitude states, and in fact he has stated that speakers' decisions to use their tacit knowledge are influenced by their "goals, beliefs, expectations, and so forth" . Far from existing behind a kind of firewall separating it from ordinary beliefs and other attitude states, tacit knowledge of language would seem to be woven into the speaker's overall network of attitude states, and to exert some variety of influence on - as well as to be influenced by - those states.
[30] Second, ordinary beliefs themselves may be largely tacit. As indicated above, beliefs are to some extent dispositional. Following , our having consciously thought about or avowed a belief is a contingent rather than a necessary feature of beliefs. This means that, as with tacit knowledge, we may "have" beliefs without necessarily having consciously thought about them. Nevertheless, when a belief of ours is brought to our attention, we do, under ordinary circumstances, tend to recognize it as such. There is no reason this cannot hold for tacit knowledge as well. In fact all that would be necessary for us to say that someone knew (believed) something, whether tacitly or not, is that when confronted with a statement or other formulation of the belief, that person should be disposed normally to feel/hold/agree that it is true
[31] It may be objected here that the acceptance condition is contingent on the belief's accessibility to consciousness, and that tacit knowledge is, by definition, inaccessible to consciousness and therefore exempt from the acceptance condition. Again, there is no reason to suppose that tacit knowledge cannot behave like ordinary dispositions to believe, and thus to be brought to awareness given the proper circumstances. Certainly, Chomsky's statement that one can come to know initially tacit rules "from the outside" would seem to indicate his acknowledgement that one could at least in principle have conscious access to one's tacit knowledge. If this is so, then there is no reason in principle that tacit knowledge must remain tacit and thus exempt from the acceptance condition. We might say then that tacit knowledge of language is tacit to the extent that it is initially inaccessible to the person to whom it is attributed, but that given the proper conditions, this inaccessibility can be converted to the kind of accessibility enjoyed by our ordinary knowledge and thus can be brought into play in relation to the acceptance condition.
[32] As mentioned above, Chomsky believes that first person reports regarding what one thinks one is doing are not always reliable. As he puts it, "We might ask Jones what rule he is following, but, . . . such evidence is at best very weak because people's judgments as to why they do what they do are rarely informative or trustworthy". There is truth to this assertion, but a closer look is warranted.
[33] What Chomsky seems to be referring to here is the normal indeterminacy that may and often does characterize an agent's first person accounts of his or her reasons for performing in a given way. Such indeterminacy may be a product of any or all of a number of factors, including the relative attentiveness with which one does something, the degree of fine-grainedness or explicitness demanded of the first-person account, and the fact that internal states are not objectively separate from the first-person perspectives form the basis of reports about those states. Absolute certainty here is out of the question -- but that does not in and of itself invalidate first person accounts.
[34] In fact, I would be inclined to understand the indeterminacy of first person reports as analogous to the underdetermination of theory by evidence. Because of the latter, we cannot (and can never) be certain that the evidence pointing to certain theoretical conclusions is absolutely conclusive. But - and Chomsky has argued this point against Quine - such underdetermination does not in and of itself automatically invalidate any reasonable conclusions we may feel we are warranted in drawing from the evidence. Just because it is possible that our conclusions will be proven wrong by more or better or subsequent evidence does not mean that we are not justified in drawing the most reasonable conclusions we can based on the evidence available to us. A similar case can be made for the value of first-person accounts. They may be far from infallible, but because they represent expressions or manifestations of what one thinks is the case with oneself, they constitute admissible evidence regarding a person's attitude states.
[35] In fact it reasonably can be held that because they tell us how things are with a person from that person's point of view, first-person reports have a certain privileged status in instances where we are trying to determine someone's attitude toward a given proposition or set of propositions. Evidence regarding what someone thinks he or she believes would seem to be especially relevant if we want to determine whether or not that person knows (believes) a given rule of language. It seems to me that in this case a first-person account would make for useful evidence that should not be ruled out on a priori grounds
[36] It is useful in this context to think of first-person reports in terms of the Wittgensteinian notion of criteria. Criteria, briefly, are normative considerations that provide grounds for justifying assertions, and thereby help to set conditions under which assertions are appropriate. By this reading, first-person reports would provide the criteria of assertibility constraining third-person ascriptions. First-person reports would, in other words, set out the normative conditions under which third-person ascriptions would be deemed appropriate or not, and would thus serve to restrict the range of attitudes we can (reasonably) ascribe to others. Since, as has pointed out, such criteria serve to help fix "what we may be wrong about, deceived about, under an illusion about" (62 quoted in , then first-person reports would exert a potentially limiting influence on third-person ascriptions. Specifically, they would show how claims made from the third-person perspective may fall outside the range of possible understandings that reasonably can be attributed to the person in question.
[37] By this light, the acceptance condition would act as the relevant criterion for ascribing knowledge of a given language rule. A third-person ascription that met the acceptance condition would, all things being equal, be considered a justified ascription. Conversely, a third-person ascription that did not meet the acceptance condition would, all things being equal, be difficult to justify. Thus S's accepting rule R as expressing his or her reason for uttering sentence A rather than sentence B would provide justification for ascribing knowledge of R to S. If on the other hand S did not accept R as expressing his or her understanding of the appropriate language behaviour, then by the criterion of the acceptance condition we would not be justified in ascribing knowledge of R to S.
[38] In spite of their built-in indeterminacy, then, first person reports and avowals would seem, for better or for worse, to be the relevant criteria by which to check the plausibility of third person ascriptions of knowledge. Consequently, first-person reports and avowals would be useful in cases where we wish to adjudicate apparently conflicting claims regarding what a given speaker knows
[39] It is easy to see how such conflict could arise. Take, again, the example of S's producing sentence A rather than sentence B. This may been explained alternately as being due to S's knowing that R - i.e., believing that adverbs are prohibited from intervening between verbs and their objects - or S's knowing that R' - i.e., believing that the value for the case assignment parameter in E is strict adjacency. Given the two very different sets of propositions comprising these rules, we would appear to have two competing claims regarding the speaker's object of belief.
[40] For even if we agree that rule R is nothing more than a consequence of the more general rule R' it is not at all certain that S would recognize this. Nor is it certain that S would understand the constituent concepts of which R' is comprised, even if he or she understood the constituent concepts of R. Many ordinary speakers of English (and others) know what verbs, objects, and adverbs are, but do not know what strict adjacency is. We could expect these speakers' first-person accounts of why they produced sentence A rather than sentence B to be put in terms of verbs, objects, and adverbs, and not in terms of strict adjacency. Accordingly, we reasonably could expect that linguists (and perhaps even only a subset of linguists) would be disposed to describe S's language behaviour in terms of strict adjacency, but that S, as an ordinary speaker, would not. As Chomsky concedes, many people may be reluctant to attribute knowledge of R' to S on account of the "unfamiliarity of the notions Case assignment and adjacency parameter." Chomsky, of course, does not hesitate to claim that S does indeed know strict adjacency. But his willingness to acknowledge others' reluctance to grant this point is interesting.
[41] Still, Chomsky holds that the unfamiliarity of the concepts used to explain S's behaviour is "irrelevant to the description of [S's] state of knowledge" . What would seem to matter here is only that the concepts belong to the best available theory, in which case we must assume that they accurately reflect S's state of knowledge. But it seems to me that what really is at issue here is not the relative familiarity of the concepts per se, but rather whether or not these (or other) concepts are properly part of S's repertoire of beliefs about the language. It seems reasonable to suppose that S cannot have the requisite attitude toward concepts that he or she cannot be said to possess. If that is the case, then S's familiarity with the given concepts is hardly a matter of indifference. As Davies has pointed out in a similar context, whether or not a person understands the concepts he or she is said to know is indeed a relevant consideration.
[42] In fact, it is difficult to see how one's not understanding a concept one is said to know can be irrelevant to deciding whether or not one knows a rule or proposition in which that concept figures. Consider the following example: I drink water because I am thirsty and I know that water will quench my thirst. But the best theory of why I drink water goes something like this: when I drink water, the water is absorbed into my bloodstream by osmosis as it enters my stomach. This causes both my blood volume and pressure to increase, and the osmotic strength of my blood to be restored to a normal level. Because this is the best theory, does that mean that I drink water because I know what that theory states?
[43] If we take a position analogous to the position Chomsky takes regarding knowledge of the rules of language, it seems to me we would have to answer "yes." Just as Chomsky holds that S's producing sentence A is guided by his or her knowing that the value for the case assignment parameter is strict adjacency, we would hold that my drinking water is guided by my knowing that the intake of water works through osmosis to cause blood volume and pressure to rise, and osmolarity to reach the proper level. In both of these cases, we would be claiming that the person in question knows what the best theory available states about the reasons for his or her behaviour, and that this knowledge enters into the relevant mechanisms for producing the behaviour
[44] But do I in fact know this technical explanation for my drinking water? Again, it is drawn from the best theory available, and certainly, my behaviour is perfectly in accord with what it would be if I did know what the theory describes. But the fact is that I did not know the theory (nor for that matter had I even heard of the term osmolarity) until I asked an expert. I did not, in other words, have the requisite familiarity with the propositions I would have to have if I could be said to know what the theory states.
[45] My having consulted an expert raises a crucial point. For, according to Chomsky, my knowledge includes what is known to experts within my speech community. Citing Putnam's notion of the division of linguistic labour, Chomsky asserts that the meaning of a term may be expressed in terms of the specialized knowledge of others in my speech community. By virtue of my being a member of a given speech community (presumably, in this case, speakers of English), in other words, my knowledge of language encompasses the best theories as formulated by the appropriate experts.
[46] But if, as I believe we should, we are to agree that the acceptance condition sets legitimate assertibility criteria constraining knowledge ascriptions, we cannot automatically attribute the experts' knowledge to any given member of a speech community. Recall the definition of knowing introduced above: even given that S belongs to a speech community in which R' is accepted as the best available explanation of a particular language behaviour, we still would have to show that S him- or herself stands in the proper attitude to the propositions and concepts making up R'. It is not enough that someone from his or her speech community stands in such an attitude; he or she must him- or herself stand in that attitude.
[47] In light of this, I believe we can reconceive the relationship between S and rule R' of the best (yet unfamiliar) theory explaining S's language behaviour. Assuming that ascription of knowledge of R' to S is unjustified given the acceptance condition and the corresponding criteria of assertibility set by S's first-person reports, we can say that, because R' is potentially available to S by virtue of its arising from the best theory available to the relevant experts in S's speech community, R' is the standard against which S's knowledge can be measured. This is not to say that S knows R' but rather that S's state of knowledge can be brought to a level such that S will accept R' as the correct explanation of the given language behaviour
[48] Like first-person criteria of assertibility, third-person standards of explanation cast our assertions of knowledge and avowals of belief in a normative light. My first-person report of why I think I behaved in a given way may be an adequate account of my own beliefs on the subject, but it may fail utterly as an adequate explanation of that behaviour - in the context of the most advanced or accepted thinking on the subject. The upshot of this is that we must think of the best third-person ascriptions of knowledge as hypotheses embodying explanatory standards that people may (or perhaps should) meet in the appropriate context.
[49] This last qualifier is crucial, for there is a degree to which the adequacy of a response will be gauged in terms of the analytical or explanatory framework within which it is elicited. There may be circumstances in which "Because I knew it would quench my thirst" would be a sufficient answer to the question "Why did you drink that glass of water?" Similarly, it can be argued that there may be contexts -- the teaching of grammar to children, for instance - in which the preferability of sentence A to sentence B is better explained in terms of verbs, adverbs, and objects rather than in terms of strict adjacency.
[50] In a general sense, third-person standards and first-person criteria set certain conditions that our assertions and avowals may meet. Explanations drawn from the best theories provide the standards toward which our own state of knowledge and repertoire of beliefs may aspire. Criteria of assertibility derived from first-person reports and avowals provide conditions placing constraints on what third-person ascriptions may hold. Thus even if the best theories for explaining behaviour serve as standards to which knowledge of that behaviour can aspire, first-person accounts still must be factored in as legitimate constraints on the range of third-person ascriptions.
When we are justified in believing a claim, we are often so justified because our belief is based on other beliefs. Yet, it is not an adequate defence of a belief merely to cite some other belief that supports it, for the supporting belief may have no epistemic credentials at all - it may be a belief based on mere prejudice, for example. In order for the supporting belief to do the work required of it, it must itself pass epistemic muster, standardly understood to mean that it must itself be justified. If so, however, the question of what justifies this belief arises as well. If it is justified on the basis of some yet further belief, that belief, too, will have to be justified; and the question will arise as to what justifies it.
Thus arises the regress problem in epistemology. Skeptics maintain that the regress cannot be avoided and hence that justification is impossible. Infinitists endorse the regress as well, but argue that the regress is not vicious and hence does not show that justification is impossible. Foundationalists and coherentists agree that the regress can be avoided and that justification is possible. They disagree about how to avoid the regress. According to foundationalism, the regress is found by finding a stopping point for the regress in terms of foundational beliefs that are justified but not wholly justified by some relationship to further beliefs. Coherentists deny the need and the possibility of finding such stopping points for the regress. Sometimes coherentism is described as the view that allows that justification can proceed in a circle (as long as the circle is large enough), and that is one logically possible version of the view (though it is very hard to find a defender of this version of coherentism). The version of coherentism that is more popular, however, objects in a more fundamental way to the regress argument. This version of coherentism denies that justification is linear in the way presupposed by the regress argument. Instead, such versions of coherentism maintain that justification is holistic in character, and the standard metaphors for coherentism are intended to convey this aspect of the view. Neurath's boat metaphor - according to which our ship of beliefs is at sea, requiring the ongoing replacement of whatever parts are defective in order to remain seaworthy–and Quine's web of belief metaphor–according to which our beliefs form an interconnected web in which the structure hangs or falls as a whole - both convey the idea that justification is a feature of a system of beliefs.
To see exactly where this conception of justification takes a stand on the regress problem, a formulation of the standard sceptical version of the regress argument will be helpful. To formulate such an argument, we need to use the idea of an inferential chain of reasons. Such an inferential chain traces the inferential dependence of a given belief, including in it as first link the belief in question, as second link whatever reason justifies it, as third link whatever epistemically supports the reason in question, and so on. The sceptical argument then proceeds as follows: No belief is justified unless its chain of reasons (I) is infinitely long,(ii) stops, or (iii) goes in a circle. An infinitely long chain of reasons involves a vicious regress of reasons that cannot justify any belief: Any stopping point to terminate the chain of reasons is arbitrary, leaving every subsequent link in the chain depending on a beginning point that cannot justify its successor link, ultimately leaving one with no justification at all.
Circular arguments cannot justify anything, leaving a chain of reasons that goes in a circle incapable of justifying any belief: coherentists are ordinarily characterized as maintaining that premise 4 of this argument is false. Though such a view would count as a version of Coherentism, standard Coherentism has no quarrel with 4, but instead rejects 1 because it presupposes that justification is non-holistic. Premise 1 assumes that justification is linear rather than holistic in virtue of characterizing justification in terms of inferential chains of reasons, and it is this feature of the regress problem to which typical coherentists object.
In sum, then, Coherentism can be negatively characterized as the view that, first, agrees with foundationalism that there is no regress of justification that is infinite (thereby rejecting both skepticism and infinitism) and, second, disagrees with foundationalism that justification depends on having an inferential chain of reasons with a suitable stopping point. This negative point can be maintained either by denying that the chain has a stopping point, thereby endorsing a linear version of Coherentism, or by denying the assumption that justification requires the existence of an inferential chain of reasons, thereby endorsing a holistic viewpoint. Since the primary examples of Coherentism in the history of the view are holistic in nature, I will focus in the remainder of this entry on this version of the views
Cherentists often defend their view by attacking foundationalism, implicitly relying on the implausibility of infinitism and skepticism. They attack foundationalism by arguing that no plausible version of the view will be able to supply enough in the way of foundational beliefs to support the entire structure of belief. This attack takes two forms. First, coherentists argue against the very idea of a basic belief, maintaining that it is always a sensible question to ask, "Why do you believe that (i.e., what reason can you give me for thinking that is true)?" Second, coherentists attack the idea that the kind of foundation developed will be adequate to support the structure. If, as is usual, foundationalists limit foundational beliefs to those about our experience in the specious present, it is hard to see how such a limited foundation can support the entire edifice of beliefs, including beliefs about the past and future, about the vast array of scientific opinion both about the observable realm and the unobservable, and about the abstract domain of mathematical and logical truth and the truths of morality. Foundationalists may, of course, introduce epistemic principles of justification that license whatever chain of reasons they wish to endorse from the foundations to the rest of the edifice of belief, but the resulting theory will look more and more ad hoc as new epistemic principles are offered whenever the threat of skepticism looms regarding a kind of belief not defensible by standard inductive and deductive rules of inference.
Regardless of the persuasiveness of these challenges to foundationalism, coherentists must and do go beyond negative philosophy to provide a positive characterization of their view. A bit of taxonomy and some specific examples will allow us to see how the required positive characterization is provided by coherentists. A useful taxonomy for Coherentism can be provided by distinguishing between subjective and objective versions of Coherentism. At a purely formal level, a version of Coherentism results from specifying two things: first, the things that must cohere in order for a given belief to be justified, and second, the relation that must hold among these things in order for the belief in question to be justified. In the realm of the logical space of Coherentism, both features can be given subjective or objective construals.
Consider first the items that need to cohere. As noted already, coherentists typically adopt a subjective viewpoint regarding the items that need to cohere, maintaining that the system on which coherence is defined is the person's system of beliefs. Coherence could be defined relative to other, more objective systems, however. Social versions of Coherentism may define coherence relative to the system of common knowledge in a given society, for example, and religious versions may define coherence relative to some body of theological doctrine. These latter two systems are objective in that the obtaining of the system in question implies nothing about the person whose belief is being evaluated. For this reason, they tend to be rather implausible, since they deny the perspectival character of justification, according to which whether or not one's beliefs are justified depends on facts about oneself and one's own perspective on the world. Versions that combine subjective and objective features are also possible. For example, a theory might begin with the system of a person's beliefs, and supplement it with additional claims that any normal person would believe in that person's situation. It is true, however, that standard versions of Coherentism are subjective about the items relative to which coherence is defined.
Even if this aspect of the view is subjective, however, belief is not the only subjective item to which a theorist might appeal, leaving one to wonder what explains the uniform agreement among coherentists that coherence should be defined relative to the class of beliefs. The reasons for this uniformity fall into two categories. One kind involves the claim that the only other possibly relevant mental states are experiential states (appearance states, sensation states), and that such states cannot be reasons at all since they lack propositional content(see Davidson 1989). This viewpoint has little plausibility to it, however. It may be true that there are some experiential states without content (perhaps the experience of pain is an experiential state without content), but it is equally true that some have content. It can appear to a person that it is raining, and the mental state involved has as content the proposition that it is raining.
A more plausible way to pursue this kind of argument is to maintain that if experiential states play a role in justification, they'll have to be able to play that role whether or not they are the kind of state that has propositional content. So, if some lack content and cannot be reasons on account of lacking content, then experiential states cannot play a role at all.
The difficulty with this line of argument is the conception of reasons it involves. It is true that if an experience has no content, then it cannot be in virtue of its content that it provides a reason. Even so, it is far from obvious that a reason has to be one in virtue of its content, for if we attend to ordinary defences people give of their beliefs, they often cite their experience as a reason. One can question whether they are merely explaining their beliefs rather than justifying them, but when that distinction is clarified, they'll still cite their experience as their reason ("Why are you grimacing?" "Because my leg hurts." "Why do you think your leg hurts?" "Because I can feel it." "Well, your experience may explain why you believe that your leg hurts, but I'm not asking for an explanation of your belief, I'm asking you to provide a reason for thinking that your belief that your leg hurts is correct; can you give me such a reason?" "Yes, because I can feel it hurting . . . )
The second category of defence for the idea that coherence is a relation on beliefs involves an argument to the effect that other mental states are either irrelevant to the question of the epistemic status of a belief (e.g., affective states such as hoping, wishing, fearing, and the like) or are insufficient for generating positive epistemic status (e.g., states such as sensation states or appearance states) - there is, after all, the issue of what to make of the sensory input, and that issue takes us beyond the sensation state itself (Lehrer 1974). The former point is unproblematic, but the latter point fails to imply the claim in question. Arguing that an appeal to experiential states is insufficient for justification in no way shows that an appeal to such states is not necessary for an adequate account of justification.
There is, however, a deeper motivation behind coherentists' aversion to defining coherence over a subjective system that includes experiential states. The worry is that appealing to experiential states in any way will result in a version of foundationalism. The understanding of foundationalism which results from the regress argument involves two features. The first is an asymmetry condition on the justification of beliefs - that inferential beliefs are justified in a way different from the way in which non-inferential beliefs are justified - and the second is an account of intrinsic or self-warrant for the beliefs which are foundationally warranted and which support the entire structure of justified beliefs. There are various proposals for how this latter commitment of foundationalism is to be formulated, but we can already see the outline of an argument for requiring that coherence not be defined over a system that includes experiential states. For if a theory were to include such states in the class of things with which a belief must cohere in order to be justified, the above considerations might seem to suggest that such a theory would have to involve some notion of intrinsic warrant or self-warrant. Some justification or warrant would be possessed by a belief, but not in virtue of some warrant-conferring relationship to any other belief. Hence, it might seem, this relation between the appearances and related beliefs would have to generate at least some positive degree of warrant for such beliefs, even if that warrant were not sufficient for full justification. Even if not sufficient for full justification, though, the theory would appear typically foundationalist in that it includes some notion of positive warrant not dependent on any relationship to other beliefs.
This argument is quite persuasive, but is ultimately flawed. The distinctive feature of foundationalism, in the context of the relationship between appearances and beliefs, is that this relation between appearances and beliefs is taken to be one which imparts positive epistemic status (perhaps only in the absence of defeaters). So, for example, if a version of foundationalism appeals to the appearance that it is raining as that which undergirds the foundational warrant for the belief that it is raining, that theory must maintain that the appearance supplies some positive warrant for the belief. It is this warrant-conferring requirement that allows Coherentism to escape the above argument, for it is open to coherentists to deny that appearances impart, or tend to impart (even in the absence of defeaters), any degree of positive epistemic status for related beliefs. The coherentists can maintain, instead, that appearances are necessary (in the usual situations) for those beliefs to have some degree of positive epistemic status, but in no way sufficient in themselves for any degree of positive epistemic status. Coherentists can go on to identify what would be sufficient in conjunction with the relation to appearances in typically coherentist fashion, focussing on the way in which any one of our beliefs is related to an entire system of information in question. The resulting theory would be one in which experience plays a role, but not the kind of role that is distinctive of foundationalism.
Another way to make this same point is to recall that Coherentism is not committed to the view that coherence is a relation on the system of the person's beliefs. For one thing, coherence might be a relation on an objective body of information, perhaps in the form of coherence with some body of common knowledge (or, more plausibly, by supplementing a system of beliefs with information any normal person would believe). So when coherentists defend a subjective version of the items over which coherence is defined, there cannot be some definitional requirement on the view that coherence must be a relation on a system of beliefs. That conclusion could be drawn only if there were a sound argument that showed that any appeal to experience would turn a theory into a version of foundationalism. Since the argument for that conclusion is flawed as explained above, Coherentism proper need not prohibit the subjective system over which coherence is defined from containing experiential states.
The second positive feature required of Coherentism is a clarification of the relation of coherence itself, and here again we find an important distinction between subjective and objective approaches. The most popular objective approach is explanatory Coherentism, which defines coherence in terms of that which makes for a good explanation. On such a view, hypotheses are justified by explaining the data, and the data are justified by being explained by our hypotheses. The central task for such a theory is to state conditions under which such explanation occurs .BonJour (1985) presents a different objective account of the coherence relation, citing the following five features in his account: (1) logical consistency;(2) the extent to which the system in question is probabilistically consistent; (3) the extent to which inferential connections exist between beliefs, both in terms of the number of such connections and their strength; (4) the inverse of the degree to which the system is divided into unrelated, unconnected subsystems of belief; and (5) the inverse of the degree to which the system of belief contains unexplained anomalies.
These factors are a good beginning toward an account of objective coherence, but by themselves they are not enough. We need to be told, in addition, what function on these five factors is the correct one by which to define coherence. That is, we need to know how to weight each of these factors to provide an assessment of the overall coherence of the system.
Even such a specification of the correct function on these factors would not be enough. One obvious fact about justification is that not all beliefs are justified to the same degree, so once we know what the overall coherence level is for a system of beliefs, we will need some further account of how this overall coherence level is used to determine the justificatory level of particular beliefs. It would be easy if the justificatory level simply matched the overall coherence level for the system itself, but this easy answer conflicts with the fact that not all beliefs are justified to the same degree
One way to address this problem is to distinguish between beliefs and strength of belief or degrees of belief. We believe some things more strongly or to a greater degree than other things. For example, I believe there is a cup of coffee on my desk much more strongly than I believe that I visited my parents in 1993, even though I believe both of those claims. Using the concept of a degree of belief, a coherentist may be able to identify what degree of belief coheres with a system of (degrees of) belief, and thereby explain how some beliefs are more justified than others. The explanation would be that one belief is more justified than another just in case a greater degree of belief coheres with the relevant system for one of the two beliefs.
The best-known example of a theory that employs the language of degrees of belief is also a useful example of a subjective account of the coherence relation. Such a subjective account can be developed by identifying a subjective theory of evidence that determines whether and when a person's belief, or degree of belief, is justified. A beautiful and elegant theory of this sort is a version of probabilistic Bayesianism. The version in question identifies justified beliefs with probabilistic coherence, so that a (degree of) belief is justified if and only if it is part of a system of beliefs against which no dutch book can be made. (A dutch book is a series of fair bets which are such that, if accepted, are guaranteed to produce a net loss.) In addition, this version of Bayesianism places a conditionalization requirement on justified changes in belief. Conditionalization requires that when new information is learned, one's new degree of belief match one's conditional degree of belief on that information prior to learning it. So if p is the new information learned, one should change one's degree of belief in q so that it matches one's degree of belief in q given p (together with everything else one knows) prior to learning q. The idea is that each person has an internal, subjective theory of evidence at a given time, in the form of conditional beliefs concerning all possible future courses of experience, so that when new information is acquired, all one needs to do is consult one's prior conditional degree of belief to determine what one's new degree of belief should be. Further, it is this subjective theory of evidence that defines the relation of coherence on the system of beliefs in question: coherence obtains when a belief conforms to the subjective theory of evidence in question, given the other items in the set of things over which coherence is defined
More generally, subjective versions of the coherence relation can be thought of in terms of the specification of a theory of evidence that is fully internal to the believer. One obvious way for the theory of evidence to be fully internal is for the theory of evidence to be contained within the belief system itself, as is true on the Bayesian theory above. There are other options, however. A subjective theory could appeal to dispositions to believe rather than to actual beliefs, or to something like one's deepest epistemic standards for trying to get to the truth and avoid error. Foley (1986) develops such a view in service of a type of foundationalist theory, understanding one's deepest standards in terms of the views one would hold given time to reflect without limitation and interference, and subjective coherentists could adopt much of this account in service of their view.
This broader characterization of the options open to subjective versions of the coherence relation carries the additional cost of appealing to the concept of what is internal to a believer, a notion that is none too clear (see the related entry justification, epistemic, internalist vs. externalist conceptions of). In broad terms, there are two important ways of thinking about what is internal here, one emphasizing whether the feature in question is somehow "in the head", and the other emphasizing whether the feature is accessible to the believer on the basis of reflection alone. Unconscious beliefs would count as internal in the first sense, but not in the second; one's own existence is internal in the second sense, but presumably not in the first.
When offering a taxonomy of subjective versus objective characterizations of the coherence relation, it is not necessary to prefer one of these characterizations of what be internal. Instead, we can allow either to be used to specify a subjective account. Doing so places a greater burden on what kinds of arguments could be given for preferring one account of the coherence relation to another, and here the arguments will proceed in two stages. The first stage will address whether one's account of the coherence relation should be objective or subjective. On the side of an objective construal are the manifold intuitions in which we describe views as unjustified even though they are, from the point of view of the believer, the best view to hold. For example, we would say that cultic beliefs, such as the belief that accepting a blood transfusion is a terrible thing to do, are unjustified; and our judgment is not altered by learning that the believer in question was raised in the cult and can't be held responsible for knowing better. On the side of a subjective construal are the arguments for access internalism, according to which the fact that some people can't be held responsible for knowing better is a clear sign that their beliefs are justified, for justification is a property whose presence is detected by careful reflection. Another argument for subjective accounts relies on the new evil demon problem. Descartes' evil demon problem threatens the truth of our beliefs, for the demon makes the beliefs of the denizens of that world false. The new evil demon problem involves the concept of justification rather than truth, threatening theories that require objective likelihood of truth for a belief to be justified. For beliefs in demon worlds are false and likely to be so, but seem to have the same epistemic status as our beliefs do, since, after all, they could be us.
Recently, a new argument has appeared for subjective accounts of justification and, by extension, for subjective accounts of the coherence relation, if Coherentism is the preferred theory of justification. This argument appeals to the idea that an adequate theory of knowledge needs to account both for the nature of knowledge and for the value of knowledge. This issue arose first in Plato's dialogue between Meno and Socrates, in which Meno originally proposes that knowledge be more valuable than true belief because it get us what we want (his particular example is finding the way to Larissa). Socrates points out that true belief will work just as well, a response that befuddles Meno. When he finally replies, he expresses perplexity regarding two things. He first wonders whether knowledge is more than true belief, and he also questions why we prize knowledge more than true belief. The first issue is one concerning the nature of knowledge, and the second concerning the value of knowledge. To account for the nature of knowledge requires minimally that one offer a theory of knowledge that is counterexample-free. To account for the value of knowledge requires an explanation of why knowledge is more valuable than its (proper) parts, including true belief and justified true belief (for more on why knowledge is more than justified true belief, see knowledge, analysis of). Such an explanation would seem to require showing two things: first, that justified true belief is more valuable than true belief; and second, that justified true belief plus whatever further condition is needed to produce a counterexample-free account of the nature of knowledge is more valuable than justified true belief on its own. These requirements show the need for a conception of justification that adds value to true belief, and it is difficult for objective theories of justification to discharge this obligation. In the context of objective accounts of the coherence relation, such an account would be governed by a formal constraint to the effect that satisfying that account would increase one's chances of getting to the truth, and theories of justification guided by such a constraint are prime examples of theories that find it difficult to explain why justified true belief is more valuable than mere true belief. The problem they encounter is called "the swamping problem." It occurs when values interact in such a way that their combination is no more valuable than one of them separately, even though both factors are positively valuable. Examples that provide relevant analogies to the epistemic case include: beautiful art is no more valuable in terms of beauty for having been produced by an artist who usually produces beautiful artwork; functional furniture has no more functional value for coming from a factory that normally produces functional furniture. Just so, true beliefs are no more valuable from the epistemic point of view - the point of view defined in terms of the goal of getting to the truth and avoiding error - by having the additional property of being likely to be true.
Adopting a subjective theory allows one to avoid the swamping problem. The swamping problem arises for theories that characterize the teleological concept of justification in terms of properties whose presence makes a belief an effective means for getting to the goal of believing the truth and avoiding error. Subjective theories may also characterize the relationship between justification and truth in terms of a means/ends relationship, but they reject the requirement that something is a means to an end only if it is an effective means to that end, i.e., only if it increases the objective chances of that goal being realized. Subjectivists advert to the deepest and most important goals in life as examples, for such goals are rarely ones for which we have much idea of which means will be effective. Consider, for example, the goal of securing some particular person as a spouse, or the goal of raising psychologically healthy, emotionally responsible children. In each case, there are well-known ways in which achieving these goals can be sabotaged, and so we try not to proceed in that fashion. The problem is that there are too many ways that have worked for other people in securing similar goals, with no-good way of assessing which of these ways would be effective in the present case. Doing nothing will certainly not work, but among the various actions available, we can only choose and hope for the best.
Subjectivists say the same for beliefs. They maintain that what is objectively a good ground for a belief is no more transparent to us than is how to maximize happiness over a lifetime. We learn by trial and error on what to base our beliefs, in much the same way as we fumble along in trying for fulfilling existence. In doing our best in the pursuit of truth, subjectivists hold, we generate justification for our beliefs, even if all we have is hope that our grounds for belief make our beliefs likely to be true.
Whether these arguments on behalf of subjectivism in the theory of knowledge are weighty enough to overcome the strong intuitions on behalf of more objective accounts is not yet settled, though there is something approaching a consensus that subjectivism cannot quite be right in spite of the arguments in its favour. To the extent that the arguments are deemed plausible, a burden is created for relieving the tension that exists between the attractions of objective accounts and the arguments for subjective accounts. One move to reconcile this conflict is to posit different senses of the term ‘justified' and its cognates. There are costs to such a move, however. One cost is that subjectivists and objectivists are confused, thinking they are disagreeing when they are not. In ordinary cases when a term has more than one meaning, competent speakers of the language are not confused in this way. Another cost is that ambiguity must be posited without any linguistic clues to its existence, and ambiguities that linguists would not discover but can only be discovered by philosophers are suspect for that reason.
Besides these family disputes within the coherentist clan, there are various problems that threaten to undermine every version of Coherentism. The focus here will be on three problems that have been widely discussed: problems related to the non-linear character of Coherentism, the input problem, and the problem of the truth connection.
The non-linear approach adopted by the most popular versions of Coherentism raises concerns that Coherentism is incompatible with a proper account of the basing relation. In brief, an account of the basing relation is needed to explain the difference between a situation where a person has good evidence for a belief, but believes it for other reasons, and a situation where has person holds the belief because of, or on the basis of, the evidence. The idea behind an appeal to the basing relation is that if the explanation of a person's belief does not appeal to the evidence for the belief, then the belief itself is not justified (even if the person has good evidence for the belief and thus the content of the belief is, in some sense, justified for that person). In the former case, where the belief is based on the evidence for it, we will say that the belief is doxastically justified; when there is good evidence for the belief, but the belief is held on other grounds, we will say that the belief is only propositionally justified.
The difficulty is that this way of drawing the distinction makes it appear that holistic Coherentism can only use the distinction if, somehow, the entire belief system of a person explains the holding of each belief that is a part of the system since, it would seem, a belief needs to be based on that which justifies it if the belief is to be properly based. If Coherentism is at its best in its holistic guises, then Coherentism succumbs because it is unable to distinguish properly based from improperly based beliefs (see Pollock 1985). If one goes so far as to maintain the stronger position that Coherentism can only be a holistic theory, then coherentists may find themselves in the position of having to maintain that all warranted beliefs are properly basic. For if holistic coherentists cannot draw a distinction between properly and improperly based beliefs, every belief will have automatically survived all requisite tests for warrant just by cohering with the relevant system. If a belief is properly based when it has survived all appropriate scrutiny, then all warranted beliefs will be properly basic, according to Coherentism.
Another way to voice this complaint is to find in the belief system a set of beliefs that can be inferentially related in an appropriate way, thereby allowing for the final step of the inference to be justified. It doesn't follow, however, that any inferential path using the same set of beliefs is a justifying one, simply because one such path is. So suppose there are two paths through the same set of five beliefs, one allowing for justification and the other not allowing for it. Let the contents of the beliefs be p, q, r, s, and t. Further, let each belief imply the next in sequence, i.e., p implies q, q implies r, and so forth. Assume as well that p, q, r, and s are all justified for the person in question. If so, a person can come to justifiably believe t by inferring from p to q to r to s and then to t. Suppose, however, that there are no other inferential relationships here besides the ones already assumed. If the order of inference were from p to s to r to q and then to t, believing t would not be justified. If holistic Coherentism can only explain proper basing in terms of whatever justifies the belief, then holistic Coherentism will be in trouble since in the case in question there is no difference in the system of beliefs in question. The only difference is in the order of inference, and this difference need imply no difference in belief.
One resource for a coherentist to use in replying to this concern about the basing relation is to distinguish between that which justifies a belief and that which is epistemically relevant to the epistemic status of belief, using this distinction to challenge the assumption that proper basing must be characterized in terms of that which justifies a belief. Consider a very abstract example. Suppose we have evidence e for p. This evidence can be defeated by further information we have, and this defeater might itself be undermined by even further information, information that would reinstate justification for p. Furthermore, there is no limit to the complexity that might be involved in this sequence of defeaters and reinstaters. Suppose, then, that the sequence of defeaters and reinstaters is significantly complex, e.g., suppose there are 20 levels of defeaters and reinstaters. From the perspective of a linear view, what must the person base a belief that p on in such a case in order for that belief to be justified? It would be unrealistic to assume that all 20 levels play a causal role in the belief, for it is not necessary to consider explicitly the sequence of defeaters and reinstaters in order to be justified in believing p. All that is necessary is that there be a reinstater for every level of defeat. If so, however, even a linear theorist will give an account of the basing relation on which it is acceptable to base a belief on something other than that which justifies the belief, all-things-considered.
Such a theorist may still maintain that one must base the belief on something that imparts prima facie justification (the kind of justification that will be all-things-considered justification if there is a reinstater for every defeater). What matters to the present discussion, however, is that even for non-holists there can be parts of a system of beliefs that are relevant to the justificatory status of a belief and yet which need not play a role in the proper basing of a justified belief. If, on the one hand, everything involved in the all-things-considered justification of a belief has to play a role in the basing relation, then every theory will be susceptible to unrealistic assumptions about the basing relation, for it is implausible to think that known rebutted defeaters enter into any kind of causal or deliberative process of belief formation and hence are not suitable candidates for helping to explain the presence of the resulting belief. For example, if I build a room with a blacklight in it, but include a device to block the light from shining on anything less than six feet off the floor, then I can know the colour of my daughter's shirt without this information about room construction entering into the story of belief formation - I need not consciously think of that information or engage in any inference guided by it, and that information need to be part of the cause of my belief. If, on the other hand, a belief can be properly based by being based on only part of the all-things-considered justification for the belief, then holists are free to clarify the basing relation in non-holistic terms as well. They can say that a belief is properly based when its presence is explained by features relevant to the all-things-considered justificatory status of a belief, even if these features themselves do not constitute an all-things-considered justification of the belief.
A simple example of such a feature illustrates how this idea would work in a holistic setting. On a holistic theory, every particular belief is insufficient for warrant on its own. Even so, a given belief might be an essential ingredient of the larger system on which coherence is defined, where that system is one of the systems under which a target belief in question could be justified. In such a case, the belief is relevant to the epistemic status of the target belief, even though it imparts no warrant to the target belief. Beliefs with such special epistemic relevance can be used to clarify what is required for a belief to be properly based without violating the holistic requirement that no such beliefs impart any degree of warrant by themselves.
A second major problem for Coherentism is the isolation objection, also called "the input problem," which Laurence BonJour formulates as follows:: Coherence is purely a matter of the internal relations between the components of the belief system; it depends in no way on any sort of relation between the system of beliefs and anything external to that system. Hence if, as a coherence theory claims, coherence is the sole basis for empirical justification, it follows that a system of empirical beliefs might be adequately justified, indeed might constitute empirical knowledge, in spite of being utterly out of contact with the world that it purports to describe. Nothing about any requirement of coherence dictates that a coherent system of beliefs need receive any sort of input from the world or be in any way causally influenced by the world (BonJour 1985)
The input problem concerns the relationship between a system of beliefs and the external world. It underlies a multitude of counterexamples to Coherentism on which we take a person at a given time with a coherent system of beliefs whose system of beliefs meshes well with their experience of the world at that given time. We then freeze this coherent system of beliefs, and vary the person's experience (so that the person still thinks, e.g., he's climbing a mountain when he's really at an opera house experiencing a performance of La Boheme), thereby isolating the system of beliefs from reality. The result is that Coherentism seems to be a theory that allows coherence to imply justification even when the system of beliefs is completely cut off from individuals' direct experience of the world around them.
The standard response by coherentists is to try to find a way to require some effect of experience in a belief system, perhaps in the form of spontaneous beliefs (BonJour 1985). Such attempts are not very promising, and lead to the impression that the only way to deal with the input problem is to transform Coherentism into a version of foundationalism. That is, the harder coherentists try to find some ineliminable effect of experience on a belief system, the more their theory hinges on finding a role for experience in the story of justification; and when foundationalism is conceived as the kind of theory that allows such a role, then the efforts of coherentists to find such a role for experience look more like acquiescence to the inevitability of affirming foundationalism. For if the only way to avoid the isolation objection is to insist that a belief system must be responsive to experience in order for the beliefs involved to be justified, and if any appeal to experience commits one to foundationalism, then Coherentism succumbs to the isolation objection. The aforementioned, however, there is nothing in Coherentism proper that requires coherence to be defined solely as a relation on beliefs. It is a mere artifact of the history of the view that coherentists always claim such, and whatever the force of the isolation objection against standard versions of Coherentism, it disappears as a problem unique to coherence theories once experience is allowed to play a role in a coherentist theory.
A longstanding objection to Coherentism can be expressed by noting that a good piece of fiction will display the virtue of coherence, but it is obviously unlikely to be true. The idea is that coherence and likelihood of truth are so far apart that it is implausible to think that coherence should be conceived of as a guide to truth at all, let alone the singular such guide that justification is supposed to constitute.
This concern over the truth connection is sometimes put in the form of the alternative systems objection, according to which there is always some coherent system to fit any belief into, so that if a person were to make sufficient changes elsewhere in the system, any belief could be justified. This particular version of the worry involves too many distractions from the fundamental problem, however. For one thing, it appeals to the idea of making vast changes to one's system of beliefs, but beliefs are not the sort of thing over which we typically can exert control. Furthermore, there is no reason to think that only one system of beliefs can be justified, so rather than constituting an objection to Coherentism, this particular formulation of the problem in question looks more like a pleasantly realistic consequence of any adequate theory of justification.
Hidden behind the explicit language of the alternative systems objection, however, is a deeper concern relying on the idea that justification is somehow supposed to be a guide to truth, and mere coherence is not a likely indicator of truth. The deeper concern will have be to formulated carefully, however, for once we see the proper response to the isolation objection above, it is far from clear how Coherentism suffers from any failure on this score that would not equally undermine foundationalism. For one way of thinking about the isolation objection is in terms of the idea that coherent systems of belief can be completely cut off from reality, in the same way that a good piece of fiction can be, and once such severance occurs, likelihood of truth must go as well. As we have seen, however, nothing about Coherentism proper forces it to succumb to this problem (as long as finding a role for experience in the story of justification blocks the objection, as it must if foundationalism can escape the objection), and if coherentists are able to find a role for experience in their theory, then coherentism cannot be criticized for failure to provide a suitable guide to truth anymore than foundationalism can.
Moreover, there are problems with casual formulations of the truth concern. First, such casual formulations can run into difficulty explaining how one can be justified in believing a scientific theory rather than believing merely the conjunction of its empirical consequences. Since the theory implies its empirical consequences, the conjunction will, in ordinary cases, have a higher probability than the theory (since it is a theorem of the probability calculus that if A entails B, then the probability of A is less than or equal to the probability of B). Second, casual formulations of the truth concern ordinarily fall prey to the new evil demon problem discussed earlier. Inhabitants of demon worlds would appear to have roughly the same justified beliefs that we have (since they could be us), but their beliefs have little chance of being true. So any formulation of the truth concern that insists that justification must imply likelihood of truth will have to find an answer to the new evil demon problem. Further, one of the fundamental lessons of the lottery and preface paradoxes has been held to be that justified inconsistent beliefs are possible. (The lottery paradox begins by imagining a fair lottery with a thousand tickets in it. Each ticket is so unlikely to win that we are justified in believing that it will lose. So we can infer that no ticket will win. Yet we know that some ticket will win. In the preface paradox, authors are justified in believing everything in their books. Some preface their book by claiming that, given human frailty, they are sure that errors remain, errors for which they take complete responsibility. But then they justifiably believe both that everything in the book is true, and that something in it is false, from which a contradiction can be easily derived.) The paradoxes are paradoxical because contradictory beliefs cannot be justified, but inconsistent beliefs, even when the inconsistency is known, are not the same thing as contradictory beliefs (the challenge, of course, is to find a principled way to stop the inconsistency from turning into a contradiction). If justified inconsistent beliefs are possible, and it surely seems that they are, then a system of beliefs can be justified even if the entire system has no chance whatsoever of being true. . . .
This possibility of justified inconsistent beliefs has been held to constitute a refutation of coherentism (see, e.g., Foley 1986), but some coherentists have demurred (e.g., Lycan 1996). One idea is to partition a system of beliefs and only apply the requirement of consistency within partitions of the system, not to the entire system itself. If consistency applies only with partitions, then, presumably, that is also where coherence does its work, leaving us with a coherence theory that is less than globally holistic. A further issue is how the partitioning is to be accomplished, and in the absence of an account of how to do so, it remains undetermined whether the possibility of justified inconsistent beliefs is compatible with coherentism.
It is fair to say that the issue of the truth connection has not been resolved for coherentism. In a way, this fact should not be surprising since the issue of the truth connection is a fundamental issue in epistemology as a whole, and it affects not only coherentism but its competitors as well
Unlike the truth condition, condition (ii), the belief condition, has generated at least some discussion. Although initially it might seems obvious that knowing that p requires believing that p, some philosophers have argued that knowledge without belief is indeed possible. Suppose Walter comes home after work to find out that his house has burned down. He utters the words "I don't believe it." Critics of the belief condition might argue that Walter knows that his house has burned down (he sees that it has), but, as his words indicate, he does not believe it. Therefore, there is knowledge without belief. To this objection, there is an effective reply. What Walter wishes to convey by saying "I don't believe it" is not that he really does not believe what he sees with his own eyes, but rather that he finds it hard to come to terms with what he sees.
A more serious counterexample has been suggested by Colin Radford. Suppose Albert is quizzed on English history. One of the questions is: When did Queen Elizabeth die?" Albert doesn't think he knows, but answers the question correctly. Moreover, he gives correct answers to many other question to which he didn't think he knew the answer. Let us focus on Albert's answer to the question about Elizabeth (E) Elizabeth died in 1603. Radford makes the following two claims about this example: Since he takes (a) and (b) to be true, Radford would argue that knowledge without belief is indeed possible. How would an advocate of the JTB account respond to Radford's proposed counterexample? Their response would be, in short, that this is not a case of knowledge without belief because it isn't a case of knowledge to begin with. Albert doesn't know (E) because he has no justification for believing (E). If he were to believe (E), his belief would be unjustified. This reply anticipates what we have not yet discussed: the necessity of the justification condition. Let us first discuss why friends of JTB hold that knowledge requires justification, and then discuss in greater detail why they would not accept Radford's alleged counterexample
Why is condition (iii) necessary? Why not say that knowledge is true belief? The standard answer is that to identify knowledge with true belief would be implausible because a belief that is true just because of luck does not qualify as knowledge. Beliefs that are lacking justification are false more often than not. However, on occasion, such beliefs happen to be true. Suppose William takes a medication that has the following side effect: it causes him to be overcome with irrational fears. One of his fears is that he has cancer. This fear is so powerful that he starts believing it. Suppose further that, by sheer coincidence, he does have cancer. So his belief is true. Clearly, though, his belief does not amount to knowledge. But why not? Most epistemologists would agree that William does not know because his belief's truth is due to luck (bad luck, in this case). Let us refer to a belief's turning out to be true because of mere luck as epistemic luck. It is uncontroversial that knowledge is incompatible with epistemic luck. What, though, is needed to rule out epistemic luck? Advocates of the JTB account would say that what is needed is justification. A true belief, if an instance of knowledge and thus not true because of epistemic luck, must be justified. But what is it for a belief to be justified?
Among the philosophers who favour the JTB approach, we find bewildering disagreement on how this question is to be answered. According to one prominent view, typically referred to as "evidentialism", a belief is justified if, and only if, it fits the subject's evidence.[] Evidentialists, then, would say that the reason why knowledge is not the same as true belief is that knowledge requires evidence. Opponents of evidentialism would say that evidentialist justification (i.e., having adequate evidence) is not needed to rule out epistemic luck. They would argue that what is needed instead is a suitable relation between the belief and the mental process that brought it about. What we are looking at here is an important disagreement about the nature of knowledge, which will be our main focus further below. In the meantime, we will continue our examination of the JTB analysis.
Returning to Radford's counterexample to the belief condition, which we considered above. We are now in a position to discuss further the reply to it. Recall that Albert does not take himself to know the answer to the question about the date of Elizabeth's death. He does not because he has does not remember having learned the basic facts of British history. Now, it is of course true that he did learn these facts, and is indeed able to recall them. But is this by itself sufficient for knowing them? Philosophers who think that knowledge requires evidence would say that it is not. Albert needs to have evidence for believing that he learned those facts. Until he is quizzed, he has no such evidence. After the quiz, when he is told that most of his answers were correct, he does have the requisite evidence. For once he comes to know that he is able to produce consistently correct answers to the questions he is asked, he has acquired evidence for believing that he must have learned this subject matter at school. This evidence is also evidence for the answers he has given. So at that point, the justification condition is met, and thus (since the other conditions of knowledge are also met) he knows (again) that Elizabeth died in 1603. However, he did not know this before he finds out that he must have learned those facts, for at that point his answer to the question lacked justification, and thus did not add up to knowledge. Evidentialists would deny, therefore, that Radford has supplied us with a counterexample to the belief condition.
"Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?", Edmund Gettier presented two effective counterexamples to the JTB analysis. The second of these goes as follows. Suppose Smith has good evidence for the false proposition (1) Jones owns a Ford. Suppose further Smith infers from (1) the following three disjunctions: (2) Either Jones owns a Ford or Brown is in Boston. (3) Either Jones owns a Ford or Brown is in Barcelona. (4) Either Jones owns a Ford or Brown is in Brest-Litovsk. Since (1) entails each of the propositions (2) through (4), and since Smith recognizes these entailments, he is justified in believing each of propositions (2)-(4). Now suppose that, by sheer coincidence, Brown is indeed in Barcelona. Given these assumptions, in believing (3), Smith holds a justified true belief. However, is it an instance of knowledge? Since Smith has no evidence whatever as to Brown's whereabouts, and believes what is true only because of luck, the answer would have to be ‘no'. Consequently, the three conditions of the JTB account -- truth, belief, and justification - are not sufficient for knowledge. How must the analysis of knowledge be modified to make it immune to cases like the one we just considered? This is what is commonly referred to as the "Gettier problem"
Epistemologists who think that the JTB approach is basically on the right track must choose between two different strategies for solving the Gettier problem. The first is to strengthen the justification condition. This was attempted by Roderick Chisholm. The second strategy is to search for a suitable further condition, a condition that would, so to speak, "degettierize" justified true belief. Let us focus on this second strategy. According to one suggestion, the following fourth condition would do the trick: (iv) S's belief that p is not inferred from any falsehood.
Unfortunately, this proposal is unsuccessful. Since Gettier cases need not involve any inference, there are possible cases of justified true belief in which the subject fails to have knowledge although condition (iv) is met. Suppose, for example, that James, who is relaxing on a bench in a park, observes a dog that, about 8 yards away from him, is chewing on a bone. So he believes (5) There is a dog over there. Suppose further that what he takes to be a dog is actually a robot dog so perfect that, by vision alone, it could not be distinguished from an actual dog. James does not know that such robot dogs exist. But in fact a Japanese toy manufacturer has recently developed them, and what James sees is a prototype that is used for testing the public's response. Given these assumptions, (5) is of course false. But suppose further that just a few feet away from the robot dog, there is a real dog. Sitting behind a bush, he is concealed from James's view. Given this further assumption, James's belief is true. So once again, what we have before us is a justified true belief that doesn't qualify as an instance of knowledge. Arguably, this belief is directly justified by a visual experience; it is not inferred from any falsehood. But if (5) is indeed a non-inferential belief, then the JTB account, even if supplemented with (iv), gives us the wrong result that James knows (5)
Another case illustrating that clause (iv) won't do the job is the well-known Barn County case. Suppose there is a county in the Midwest with the following peculiar feature. The landscape next to the road leading through that county is peppered with barn-facades: structures that from the road look exactly like barns. Observation from any other viewpoint would immediately reveal these structures to be fakes: devices erected for the purpose of fooling unsuspecting motorists into believing in the presence of barns. Suppose Henry is driving along the road that leads through Barn County. Naturally, he will on numerous occasions form a false belief in the presence of a barn. Since Henry has no reason to suspect that he is the victim of organized deception, these beliefs are justified. Now suppose further that, on one of those occasions when he believes there is a barn over there, he happens to be looking at the one and only real barn in the county. This time, his belief is justified and true. But its truth is the result of luck, and thus his belief is not an instance of knowledge. Yet condition (iv) is met in this case. His belief is clearly not the result of any inference from a falsehood. Once again, we see that (iv) does not succeed as a solution to the Gettier problem.
Above, we noted that the role of the justification condition is to ensure that the analysans does not mistakenly identify as knowledge a belief that is true because of epistemic luck. The lesson to be learned from the Gettier problem is that the justification condition by itself cannot ensure this. Even a justified belief, understood as a belief based on good evidence, can be true because of luck. Thus if a JTB analysis of knowledge is to rule out the full range of cases of epistemic luck, it must be amended with a suitable fourth condition, a condition that succeeds in preventing justified true belief from being "gettiered." We will refer to an analysis of this type as a "JTB+" conception of knowledge. The analysis of knowledge may be approached by asking the following question: What turns a true belief into knowledge? An uncontroversial answer to this question would be: the sort of thing that effectively prevents a belief from being true as a result of epistemic luck. Controversy begins as soon as this formula is turned into a substantive proposal. According to evidentialism, which endorses the JTB+ conception of knowledge, the combination of two things accomplishes this goal: evidentialist justification plus degettierization (a condition that prevents a true and justified belief from being "gettiered"). However, according to an alternative approach that has in the last three decades become increasingly popular, what stands in the way of epistemic luck - what turns a true belief into knowledge - is the reliability of the cognitive process that produced the belief. Consider how we acquire knowledge of our physical environment: we do so through sense experience. Sense experiential processes are, at least under normal conditions, highly reliable. There is nothing accidental about the truth of the beliefs these processes produce. Thus beliefs produced by sense experience, if true, should qualify as instances of knowledge. An analogous point could be made for other reliable cognitive processes, such as introspection, memory, and rational intuition. We might, therefore, say that what turns true belief into knowledge is the reliability of our cognitive processes.
This approach -- reliabilism, as it is usually called - can be carried out in two different ways. First, there is reliabilism as a theory of justification (J- reliabilism). Here the idea is that while justification is indeed necessary for knowledge, its nature is not evidentialist but reliabilist. The most basic version of this view - let's call it "simple" J-reliabilism - goes as follows: S is justified in believing that p if, and only if, S's belief that p was produced by a reliable cognitive process. Second, there is reliabilism as a theory of knowledge (K-reliabilism). According to this approach, knowledge does not require justification. Rather, what it requires (in addition to truth) is reliable belief formation. Fred Dretske defends this view as follows: Those who think knowledge required something other than, or at least more than, reliably produced true belief, something (usually) in the way of justification for the belief that one's reliably produced beliefs are being reliably produced, have, it seems to me, an obligation to say what benefits this justification is supposed to confer . . . Who needs it, and why? If an animal inherits a perfectly reliable belief-generating mechanism, and it also inherits a disposition, everything being equal, to act on the basis of the belief so generated, what additional benefits are conferred by a justification that the beliefs are being produced in some reliable way? If there are no additional benefits, what good is this justification? Why should we insist that no one can have knowledge without it?
Further below we will discuss how advocates of the JTB approach might answer Dretske's question. In the meantime, let us focus a bit more on Dretske's account of knowledge. According to Dretske, reliable cognitive processes convey information, and thus endow not only humans, but (nonhuman) animals as well, with knowledge. He writes: I wanted a characterization that would at least allow for the possibility that animals (a frog, rat, ape, or my dog) could know things without my having to suppose them capable of the more sophisticated intellectual operations involved in traditional analyses of knowledge.
Attributing knowledge to animals is certainly in accord with our ordinary practice of using the word ‘knowledge'. Dretske seems right, therefore, when he views the result that animals have knowledge as a desideratum. A second advantage of his theory is, so Dretske claims, that it avoids Gettier problems. He says Gettier difficulties . . . arise for any account of knowledge that makes knowledge a product of some justificatory relationship (having good evidence, excellent reasons, etc.) that could relate one to something false . . . This is [a] problem for justificational accounts. The problem is evaded in the information-theoretic model, because one can get into an appropriate justificational relationship to something false, but one cannot get into an appropriate informational relationship to something false.
Solving the Gettier-problem is, however, a bit more complex than this passage suggests. Consider again the case of Henry in Barn County. He sees a real barn in front of him, yet does not know that there is a barn near-by. Exactly how can Dretske's theory explain Henry's failure to know? After all, he perceives an actual barn, and so does not stand in any informational relationship to something false. So if perception, on account of its reliability, normally conveys information, it should do so in this case as well. Alas, it doesn't. Clearly, if a theory like Dretske's is to handle this case and others like it, it must be supplemented with a clause that makes it immune to the case of the fake barns, and other examples like it.
Evidentialists reject both J-reliabilism and K-reliabilism. They reject J-reliabilism because they advocate internalism: they take justification to be something that is "internal" to the subject. J-reliabilists disagree; they take justification to be something that is "external" to the subject In order to pin down what the "internality" of justification is supposed to be, let us turn to Roderick Chisholm, one of the chief advocates of internalism. In the third edition of The Theory of Knowledge, Chisholm says the following: If a person S is internally justified in believing a certain thing, then this may be something he can know just by reflecting upon his own state of mind In the second edition of this book, he characterizes internalism in a somewhat different way: We presuppose . . . that the things we know are justified for us in the following sense: we can know what it is, on any occasion, that constitutes our grounds, or reasons, or evidence for thinking that we know
These passages differ in the following respect: in the first Chisholm is concerned with the property of justification (a belief's being justified); in the second, with justifiers: the things that make justified beliefs justified. What is common to both passages is the constraint Chisholm imposes. In the first passage, Chisholm characterizes justification as something that is recognizable on reflection, and in the second as the sort of thing that can be known on any occasion. Arguably, this is just a terminological difference. It would not be implausible to claim that what can be recognized through reflection is something that can be recognized on any occasion, and what can be recognized on any occasion is something that can be recognized through reflection. Although this point deserves further examination, let us here simply assume that recognizability on reflection and recognizability on any occasion amount to the same thing. In what follows, we will refer to it as direct recognizability. The aforementioned, in the first passage Chisholm imposes the direct recognizability constraint on justification, in the second on justifiers. Does this amount to a substantive difference? If the direct recognizability of justifiers implies the direct recognizability of justification, and vice versa, then the two passages we considered would indeed just be alternative ways of stating the same point. Whether they really are is debatable, but here we will simply assume that it makes no difference whether internalism is characterized in terms of the direct recognizability of justification, or that of justifiers.
Chisholm, then, defines internalism in terms of how justification (justifiers) is (are) knowable, that is, in terms of direct recognizability, or epistemic accessibility. This type of internalism may therefore be called accessibility internalism. Alternatively, internalism can be defined in terms of limiting justifiers to mental states. According to this second way of defining internalism, justifiers must be internal to the mind, i.e., must be mental events or states. Internalism thus defined could be referred to as mental state internalism. Whether accessibility internalism and mental state internalism are genuine alternatives depends on whether mental states (and events) are directly recognizable. If they are, what appear to be genuine alternatives might in fact not be. Since here we cannot go into the details of this issue, we will cut this matter short and simply define internalism, as suggested by Chisholm, in terms of direct recognizability, while acknowledging that it might be preferable to define it by restricting justifies to mental states. We will refer to internalism as defined here as "J-internalism," since it imposes the direct recognizability constraint on not knowledge, but justification. Justification is directly recognizable. At any time t at which S holds a justified belief B, S is in a position to know at t that B is justified. J-internalism is to be contrasted with J-externalism, which is simply its negation. Justification is not directly recognizable. It is not the case that at any time t at which S holds a justified belief B, S is in a position to know at t that B is justified. (There are times at which S holds a justified belief B but is not in a position to know that B is justified.)
Next, we will discuss what consequences we can derive from J-internalism. To begin with, we can derive the result that simple J-reliabilism is an externalist theory. According to Simple J-Reliabilism, reliability by itself - without the subject's having any evidence indicating its presence - is sufficient for justification. So simple J-reliabilism allows for possible cases of the following kind To illustrate this point, let us consider a familiar example due to Laurence BonJour. Suppose Norman is a perfectly reliable clairvoyant. At time t, his clairvoyance causes Norman to form the belief that the president is presently in New York. However, Norman has no evidence whatever indicating that he is clairvoyant. Nor has he at t any way of recognizing that his belief was caused by his clairvoyance. Norman, then, cannot at t recognize that his belief is justified. So Simple J-reliabilism implies that Norman's belief is justified at t although Norman cannot recognize at that his belief is justified. Simple J-Reliabilism, therefore, is a version of J-externalism.
Second, J-internalism allows us to derive the consequence - as it should - that evidentialism is an internalist theory. The question of what a person's evidence consists of is of course not uncontroversial. Nor is it uncontroversial what kind of cognitive access a subject has to her evidence. However, it would certainly not be without a good deal of initial plausibility, at least if one looks at the matter from the point of view of the evidentialist, to make the following two assumptions. First, a subject's evidence consists of both her beliefs and experiential states (such as sensory, introspective, memorial, and intuitional states). Second, a subject's beliefs and experiential states are directly recognizable to her. And if we now add the further assumption (mentioned above) that the direct recognizability of justifiers implies the direct recognizability of justification, then we get the result that evidentialism is a form of J-internalism. Let us display the argument in detail:
The crucial premises in this argument are (2) and (4). Surely, evidentialists would be reluctant to call "evidence" something that is not directly recognizable to a subject So (2) would appear to be a premise that evidentialists are likely to endorse. And (4) expresses no more than one part of what we already assumed: that the direct recognizability of justifiers implies the direct recognizability of justification, and vice versa. Of course, this assumption might be challenged. What seems safe to say, therefore, is the conditional point that, if (2) and (4) capture what is essential to evidentialism, then evidentialism implies internalism about justification As mentioned, the evidentialists also reject K-reliabilism. They do so because, pace Dretske, they think that internal justification -- justification in the form of having adequate evidence -- is necessary for knowledge. In other words, they deny that a belief's origin in a reliable cognitive process is sufficient for the belief's being an instance ofknowledge. Let us refer to this position as internalism about knowledge, or K-internalism, and let us define it using the concept of internal justification: the kind of justification that meets the direct recognizability constraint.
Internal justification is a necessary condition of knowledge. A belief's origin in a reliable cognitive process is not sufficient for its being an instance of knowledge. K-externalism is simply the negation of internalism: Internal justification is not a necessary condition of knowledge. A belief's origin in a reliable cognitive process is sufficient for its being an instance of knowledge. Consequently, there are cases of knowledge without internal justification. We have merely concerned ourselves with what internalists and externalists disagree about with regard to both justification and knowledge. In the next two sections, we will examine what reasons internalists and externalists can cite in support of their respective views.
To begin with, one straightforward argument for J-internalism proceeds from evidentialism as a premise. For as we have seen above, there is a plausible construal of evidentialism that proceeds from the direct recognizability of a person's evidence to the direct recognizability of justification. So philosophers who are attracted to evidentialism are likely to be attracted to J-internalism as well. Furthermore, as was already mentioned at the end of the previous section, evidentialism is not only a view about the nature of justification, but also a view about the nature of knowledge. And what evidentialists would say about the nature of knowledge is this: having justification -- in the form of having adequate evidence -- is a necessary condition of knowledge. But such justification is plausibly construed as internal justification, as satisfying the direct recognizability constraint that J-internalism imposes. S is justified in believing that p iff in believing that p, S does not violate his epistemic duty. The concept of duty employed here must not be confused with ethical duty, or prudential duty. The type of duty in question is specifically epistemic. Exactly what epistemic duties are, however, is a matter of controversy. The basic idea is that epistemic duties are those that arise in the pursuit of truth. Thus we might express (1) alternatively as follows: S is justified in believing that p iff in believing that p, S does not fail to do what he ought to do in the pursuit of truth. Of course, this way of putting things leads us directly to a further question: in the pursuit of truth, exactly what is it that one ought to do? Evidentialists would say: it is to believe what, and only what, one has evidence for. Now if that is one's epistemic duty, then those who take justification to be deontological can employ the argument considered above (which proceeds from evidentialism to J-internalism) to derive the conclusion that deontological justification is internal justification. So the combination of deontology about justification with evidentialism allows for a pretty straightforward derivation of J-internalism.It has also been suggested that there be a more direct argument from deontology to J-internalism, an argument that does not depend on evidentialism as a premise. It derives the direct recognizability of justification from the premise that what determines epistemic duty is directly recognizable. Therefore: (2) follows directly from the deontological conception of justification. (5) is nothing new?; we have assumed it above already. The argument's main premise is of course (3) Certainly (3) is not obviously implausible. Nevertheless, it is open to criticism, as is (5), which we merely assumed. Obviously, then, the argument is not uncontroversial. Nevertheless, it seems fair to say that it represents a straightforward and defensible derivation of internalism from deontology.
Third, internalism (J or K) can be defended indirectly on the basis of objections to particular externalist accounts of justification or knowledge. Since reliabilism is the dominant externalist approach, let us briefly consider a couple of internalist objections to reliabilism. First, recall BonJour's example of Norman: a subject who unwittingly possesses a reliable faculty of clairvoyance. This faculty produces the belief that the president is in New York, a belief that is reliably produced, and thus according to simple J-reliabilism justified. But is that belief really justified? Internalists would say that Norman's belief is actually unjustified, and thus not an instance of knowledge. They would say, therefore, that a belief's being reliably produced is not sufficient for making it justified, and that a true belief's being reliably produced is not sufficient for making it an instance of knowledge.
Second, internalists would say that reliable belief production is not even necessary for knowledge. Suppose you are a victim of Descartes's evil demon. You believe that you have a body and that there is a world of physical things, but in fact neither of these beliefs is true. There is no physical world at all. Since your perceptual beliefs are not reliably produced under these circumstances, simple J-reliabilism implies that they are unjustified. To internalists, this is an intuitively implausible result. They would take your beliefs to be (by and large) justified because they are (by and large) based on adequate evidence or good reasons. Hence they would reject the claim that being produced by reliable faculties is a necessary condition of epistemic justification.
One reason for externalism lies in the attraction of "philosophical naturalism." According to Gilbert Harman, this view, when applied to ethics, "is the doctrine that moral facts are facts of nature. Naturalism as a general view is the sensible thesis that all facts are facts of nature."What naturalists in ethics want, according to Harman, is to be able to locate value, justice, right, wrong, and so forth in the world in the way that tables, colours, genes, temperatures, and so on can be located in the world. According to this conception of naturalism, a naturalist in epistemology wants to be able to locate such things as knowledge, certainty, epistemic justification, and probability "in the world in the way that tables, colours, genes, temperatures, and so on can be located in the world." How, though, are naturalists to accomplish this? According to one answer to this question, they can accomplish this by identifying the non-epistemic grounds on which epistemic phenomena supervene. Alvin Goldman describes this desideratum as follows: The term "justified," I presume, is an evaluative term, a term of appraisal. Any correct definition or synonym of it would also feature evaluative terms. I assume that such definitions or synonyms might be given, but I am not interested in them. I want a set of substantive conditions that specify when a belief is justified . . . I want a theory of justified belief to specify in non-epistemic terms when a belief is justified
However, internalists need not deny that epistemic phenomena supervene on non-epistemic grounds, and that it is the task of epistemology to reveal these grounds. That is, internalists might as well agree that what a theory of justification ought to accomplish is an account of the substantive conditions of justification that is carried out in non-epistemic terms. It is doubtful, therefore, that the goal of locating epistemic value in the natural world establishes a link between philosophical naturalism and externalism.
According to a second answer to the question of how epistemic value can be located in the natural world, the way to do that is to employ the methods of the natural sciences. Appealing to this methodological constraint, externalists might argue that, because the study of justification and knowledge is an empirical study, justification and knowledge cannot be what internalists take it to be, but rather must be identified with reliable belief production: a phenomenon that can be studied empirically. It is far from clear, however, that the fundamental questions of epistemology can be answered by employing the methods of natural science. If they cannot be answered that way, then epistemology cannot be done without employing, at least to some extent, the a priori methods of the armchair philosopher. But then the universal scope of the methodological constraint in question remains unmotivated, and no compelling reason remains to think that justification and knowledge are the sort of thing that can only be studied empirically, and thus cannot be what internalist take them to be
A second reason for externalism (more specifically, J-externalism) has to do with the connection between justification and truth. Internalists conceive of a justified belief as a belief that, relative to the subject's evidence or reasons, is likely to be true. However, such likelihood of truth is compatible with the belief's actual falsity. Indeed, such likelihood of truth is compatible with the evil demon scenario in which the vast majority of your empirical beliefs, although justified, is in fact false. Externalists consider this connection between justification and truth too thin, and thus demand a stronger kind of likelihood of truth. Reliability is usually taken to fill the bill William Alston, for example, would concur that, without a reliability constraint, the connection between justification and truth becomes too tenuous. He argues that only reliably formed beliefs can be justified, and defines a reliable belief-producing mechanism as one that "would yield mostly true beliefs in a sufficiently large and varied run of employments in situations of the sorts we typically encounter." Suppose we endorse this conception of justification. Let's suppose further that most of our beliefs are justified. It then follows that most of the beliefs we form in ordinary circumstances would have to be true most of the time. Such a belief system could still be brought about by an evil demon. However, it would not be a belief-system consisting of mostly false beliefs, and thus the evil demon responsible for it wouldn't be quite as evil as he could be. So what Alston-type justification rules out is this: a belief system of mostly justified beliefs that is generated by an evil demon who sees to it that most of our beliefs are false. This, then, is the benefit we can secure when, as externalists suggest, we make reliability a necessary element of justification.
Internalists would object that a strong link between justification and truth runs afoul of the rather forceful intuition that the beliefs of an evil demon victim are justified although they are mostly false. In response, externalists might concede that the sort of justification internalists have in mind and attribute to evil demon victims is a legitimate concept, but question the epistemological relevance of that concept. Of what epistemic value (of what value to the acquisition of knowledge), they might ask, is internal justification if it is the sort of thing an evil demon victim can enjoy, a person whose belief system is massively marred by falsehood? Internalists would reply that internal justification should not be expected to supply us with a guarantee of truth, and that its value derives from the fact that internal justification is necessary for knowledge.
A third reason for externalism has to do with Dretske's question about justification: "Who needs it, and why?" Dretske would say, of course, that nobody needs it (for the acquisition of knowledge, that is) because reliable belief production is sufficient for turning true belief into knowledge. With this, internalists disagree. They take the existence of examples like BonJour's clairvoyant Norman as a decisive reason to reject this sufficiency claim. According to them, Norman's belief about the whereabouts of the president, although reliably formed, is clearly unjustified, and thus not an instance of knowledge. Internalists, therefore, would answer Dretske's question thus: Those who wish to enjoy knowledge need justification, and they need it because one does not know that p unless one has adequate evidence or undefeated reasons for believing that p.
In reply to this, Dretske might repeat a point - a point that amounts to a fourth reason for externalism - from the passage we considered above: he takes animals such as frogs, rats, apes, and dogs to have knowledge. This is surely in line with the way we ordinarily use the concept of knowledge. The owner of a pet who does not attribute knowledge to it would be hard to find. But are animals capable of the sophisticated mental operations required by beings who enjoy the sort of justification internalists have in mind? It would seem not. At this point, the disagreement between internalists and externalists appears unresolvable. On the one hand, there are examples like BonJour's clairvoyant Norman, examples that strongly suggest that internal justification be necessary for knowledge. On the other hand, there is Dretske's point that knowledge is enjoyed by not only humans but animals as well. And this strongly suggests that internal justification is not necessary for knowledge.
K-internalism and K-externalism, then, are supported by conflicting intuitions. On the one hand, there is the thought that in order to know, one must have justification in the form of having adequate evidence or reasons. On the other hand, there is the thought that knowledge, resulting from reliable cognitive faculties, is not reserved to humans only. Both of these thoughts are inherently plausible. However, if it is indeed true that animals are not the sort of beings that can have internally justified or unjustified beliefs, these intuitions cannot be reconciled. If they cannot, then we get as a result of this irreconcilability two alternative and competing analyses of knowledge: one internalist, the other externalist. Let us state a gloss of the respective analyses. In these analyses, the term "internal justification" stands for the kind of concept internalists have in mind, and the term "external justification" for the kind of concept externalists employ.. S knows that p iff. If the internalism/externalism controversy is seen as essentially a controversy over the nature of knowledge, the debate over J-internalism vs. J-externalism would appear to be a case of talking past each other. J-internalists and J-externalists simply intend justification to achieve different things. They each operate with a different concept of justification. J-externalists take justification to be the sort of thing that turns true belief into knowledge, and view the Gettier problem merely as the problem of adding the right sort of bells and whistles to the justification-condition. J-internalists, on the other hand, cannot view degettierization as something that can, in the form of a suitable clause, be tacked on to the justification condition, for degettierization is an external matter. Rather, internalists take justification to be the sort of thing that turns true and degettiered belief into knowledge. Since J-internalists and J-externalists assign different roles to justification, what they ultimately disagree about is not the nature of justification, but the sort of thing in relation to which the theoretical role of epistemic justification is fixed: knowledge. Internalists assign justification the role of turning true and degettiered belief into knowledge because they take internal justification to be necessary for knowledge. In contrast, externalists assign a different role - that of turning true belief into knowledge - to justification because they think that internal justification is not necessary for knowledge. It is this difference in their respective views on the nature of knowledge that leads to different views on the nature of justification.
Thus we are confronted with a fundamental disagreement about the nature of knowledge. Externalists such as Dretske would say that the desideratum of making knowledge a natural phenomenon that is instantiated equally by humans and animals must trump the demand that knowledge require the possession of justification in the form of adequate evidence. They would have to say, therefore, that Norman, the unwitting clairvoyant, has knowledge just as much as a mouse that knows where to look for the cheese. Internalists would argue the other way around. To them, Norman-type cases establish the necessity of adequate evidence or undefeated reasons. And so they would say that, just as Norman's reliable clairvoyance (by itself, in the absence of evidence) does not give him knowledge, a mouse's reliable cognitive mechanisms do not give it knowledge of where to look for the cheese. Externalists would say that it merely seems to us that Norman lacks knowledge when in fact he has it. Internalists would say that it merely seems to us that animals know when in fact they do not.
Who is right about the nature of knowledge: internalists or externalist? It might be a mistake to expect that there is a decisive argument that settles the dispute one way or the other. Most likely, one reason why the nature of knowledge is a subject matter of philosophy is that in the end its nature remains enigmatic. Nevertheless, the common ground shared by IK and EK should not be overlooked. Both require true belief and external justification. What is contentious is merely the further question of whether knowledge requires internal justification as well
The traditional formulation of propositional knowledge (in Western philosophy) involves three key components: justification, truth, and belief (JTB). Propositional knowledge is, in this tradition, a justified belief held about a truth. To elaborate, the formulation holds that three conditions are necessary, and jointly sufficient for "knowledge". First, belief: you do not know something unless you also hold it as true in your mind; if you do not believe it, then you do not know it. Second, truth: there can be no knowledge of false propositions; belief in a falsehood is delusion or misapprehension, not knowledge. Third, justification: the belief must be appropriately supported; there must be sufficient evidence for the belief.
Thus, knowledge is like a three-legged stool which cannot stand when any one leg is removed. Consider lack of belief: it may be true that Alice's twin sister has just been killed in a car accident, and the police officer reporting the fact may be sufficient evidence to warrant belief, but Alice may find herself unable to accept it, and will thus fail to know it. Lack of truth also disqualifies knowledge: the pre-Copernican belief (amply justified at the time) that heavenly bodies moved around a stationary Earth is false, and is thus not knowledge, even if educated persons of the day operated under the misapprehension that it was. Lastly, lack of justification precludes knowledge: if a charlatan fortune-teller informs Alice that she will meet the man of her dreams within a month, then this proposition isn't knowledge for Alice even if she believes it and it actually happens. Knowledge must be properly grounded, and the charlatan's claim had no grounds whatsoever.
This traditional formulation is not without its problems. One could argue, for example, that "knowledge", so defined, is not a very interesting concept: the individual questions of whether a proposition is true, whether a subject believes it, and whether the subject is justified in doing so do not become more interesting when the answers happen to be uniformly affirmative. Or one could argue the pragmatic case that "knowledge" is not a useful concept: it's all very well to ponder whether subject S knows proposition P given a hypothetical situation with specified truths, but what of knowledge in the real world, where determining the truth of P is part of the problem?
More significantly, perhaps, one could argue that JTB is not actually an entirely sufficient account of knowledge; that situations arise in which a justified true belief is not knowledge. Edmund Gettier makes a famously disruptive case for this view in a short paper entitled, "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?" (originally published in Analysis, 1963, pp. 121-3). Consider the following scenario from that paper. Smith and Jones are candidates for a job, and Smith believes that (a) Jones will get the job, and (b) Jones has ten coins in his pocket. Smith's belief in both these propositions is justified: a company executive has informed him that Jones will be hired, and he's seen the coins in question. Based on these justified beliefs, Smith also believes (quite justifiably) their logical implication: the person who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket.
Events transpire in such a way that Jones does not get the job, despite assurances to the contrary, and the job is offered to Smith instead. As chance would have it, proposition turns out to be true anyway, because Smith also had ten coins in his pocket, although he didn't realise it at the time. Thus, Smith justifiably believed proposition, and it turned out to be true, but did he know it? The traditional account says so, but does this still match our intuitive grasp of what knowledge entails? It seems not.
One possible way of saving the JTB account from Gettier is to argue that Smith's justification for was undermined, and thus he did not know because his belief was not appropriately justified. Proposition follows logically from (a) and (b) only if they are both true, and it turns out that (a) is false. Proposition can still be true independently of both (a) and (b), as actually transpired, but Smith's grounds for belief in © was the truth of (a) and (b). If there is a shortfall in JTB, it is merely that we ought to have mentioned that justification must not be undermined by subsequent events.
This embellishment of JTB salvages it from the given counterexample by denying the presence of justification, but other Gettier-style counterexamples may still prove problematic. More than anything else, this saving measure serves to demonstrate how much wriggle-room exists in the "justification" component, and that makes it a more intrinsically interesting concept (to my mind) than its possible by-product, "knowledge".
These days it would appear that the Special Theory of Relativity was beyond any form of doubt however I have a theoretical proof that would strongly suggest that the theory is fundamentally flawed. Indeed the proof is so straight forward it is a wonder so many supposedly acute minds have previously overlooked it. The proof runs as follows : If an observer with velocity v heads towards a beam of light one would have expected that the measurable velocity of the light beam would have been c + v. However according to the Special Theory of Relativity because time slows down and length decreases with velocity, the measured velocity of the beam would still be c. In other words a change in space and time for the observer slowed the new velocity of c + v back down to c again. However if the observer now heads in the opposite direction with the same velocity one would have expected that the measurable velocity of the beam without any relativistic effects, would now be c – v. But on this occasion a change in space and time for the observer would have to increase the measured velocity of light, the exact opposite of the case with c + v. But how could this be if time slows and length decreases with velocity, for the opposite to occur one would have expected that time would have needed to have speeded up and length increased? However both cannot be the case so therefore the speed of light could not remain constant when an observer's velocity changed with respect to either magnitude or direction.
The origin of this scientific red herring lies with the famous (though some may perhaps argue infamous) Michelson-Morley experiment. It was conducted by the two Americans whom it was named after in 1887 in order to prove or disprove the existence of ‘aether', the enigmatic substance thought to be contained in a vacuum upon which a light wave was able to move upon. The apparatus consisted of two beams of light meeting at right angles at an interferometer. If the Earth's speed effected either of the velocities of the light beams then the interference pattern obtained would change. However it was found that the speed of the Earth about the Sun did not appear to effect the interference pattern in any way and it was upon this observation that Einstein based his Special Theory of Relativity.
However just the briefest look at the exact set-up of the apparatus used by Michelson and Morley clearly reveals that the experiment could never have worked anyway. Indeed the logic supporting it is so flawed it is a wonder that no-one appears to have ever noticed. The two light beams which meet at the interferometer first travel away from it and at equal distances are reflected back again to the same half-silvered glass it started from. However because each light beam exactly doubles back on itself each time, it is obvious what the light beam would have gained as a result of the Earth's velocity in one direction, it would exactly lose on the way back again in the opposite direction, and vice versa. Indeed the experiment would never have proved or disproved the existence of the aether either
Since the proof stated above clearly shows that the Special Theory of Relativity could never work, it must also be the case that a large part of the General Theory of Relativity is equally unsound since it is entirely based upon the Special Theory. As a consequence it would therefore appear that a significant part of twentieth century physics needs to be re-thought since the Theory of Relativity is intimately interwoven into it. Indeed Einstein's theory is so well established these days that it is even included in many of the physics text books
"Proof that E could Never Equal mc²" which questions both the theoretical and mathematical basis of the famous equation of mass-energy equivalence, E = mc².
First it is impossible to picture empty space. All our efforts to imagine pure space from which the changing images of material objects are excluded can only result in a representation in which highly-coloured surfaces, for instance, are replaced by lines of slight colouration, and if we continued in this direction to the end, everything would disappear and end in nothing. Hence arises the irreducible relativity of space.
Whoever speaks of absolute space uses a word devoid of meaning. This is a truth that has been long proclaimed by all who have reflected on the question, but one which we are too often inclined to forget.
If I am at a definite point in Paris, at the Place du Panthéon, for instance, and I say, "I will come back here tomorrow;" if I am asked, "Do you mean that you will come back to the same point in space?" I should be tempted to answer yes. Yet I should be wrong, since between now and tomorrow the earth will have moved, carrying with it the Place du Panthéon, which will have travelled more than a million miles. And if I wished to speak more accurately, I should gain nothing, since this million of miles has been covered by our globe in its motion in relation to the sun, and the sun in its turn moves in relation to the Milky Way, and the Milky Way itself is no doubt in motion without our being able to recognise its velocity. So that we are, and shall always be, completely ignorant how far the Place du Panthéon moves in a day. In fact, what I meant to say was,"Tomorrow I shall see once more the dome and pediment of the Panthéon," and if there was no Panthéon my sentence would have no meaning and space would disappear.
This is one of the most commonplace forms of the principle of the relativity of space, but there is another on which Delbeuf has laid particular stress. Suppose that in one night all the dimensions of the universe became a thousand times larger. The world will remain similar to itself, if we give the word similitude the meaning it has in the third book of Euclid. Only, what was formerly a metre long will now measure a kilometre, and what was a millimetre long will become a metre. The bed in which I went to sleep and my body itself will have grown in the same proportion. When I awake in the morning what will be my feeling in face of such an astonishing transformation? Well, I shall not notice anything at all. The most exact measures will be incapable of revealing anything of this tremendous change, since the yard-measures I shall use will have varied in exactly the same proportions as the objects I shall attempt to measure. In reality the change only exists for those who argue as if space were absolute. If I have argued for a moment as they do, it was only in order to make it clearer that their view implies a contradiction. In reality it would be better to say that as space is relative, nothing at all has happened, and that it is for that reason that we have noticed nothing.
Have we any right, therefore, to say that we know the distance between two points? No, since that distance could undergo enormous variations without our being able to perceive it, provided other distances varied in the same proportions. We saw just now that when I say I shall be here tomorrow, that does not mean that tomorrow I shall be at the point in space where I am today, but that tomorrow I shall be at the same distance from the Panthéon as I am today. And already this statement is not sufficient, and I ought to say that tomorrow and today my distance from the Panthéon will be equal to the same number of times the length of my body.
But that is not all. I imagined the dimensions of the world changing, but at least the world remaining always similar to itself. We can go much further than that, and one of the most surprising theories of modern physicists will furnish the occasion. According to a hypothesis of Lorentz and Fitzgerald, all bodies carried forward in the earth's motion undergo a deformation. This deformation is, in truth, very slight, since all dimensions parallel with the earth's motion are diminished by a hundred-millionth, while dimensions perpendicular to this motion are not altered. But it matters little that it is slight; it is enough that it should exist for the conclusion I am soon going to draw from it. Besides, though I said that it is slight, I really know nothing about it. I have myself fallen a victim to the tenacious illusion that makes us believe that we think of an absolute space. I was thinking of the earth's motion on its elliptical orbit round the sun, and I allowed 18 miles a second for its velocity. But its true velocity (I mean this time, not its absolute velocity, which has no sense, but its velocity in relation to the ether), this I do not know and have no means of knowing. It is, perhaps, 10 or 100 times as high, and then the deformation will be 100 or 10,000 times as great.
It is evident that we cannot demonstrate this deformation. Take a cube with sides a yard long. it is deformed on account of the earth's velocity; one of its sides, that parallel with the motion, becomes smaller, the others do not vary. If I wish to assure myself of this with the help of a yard-measure, I shall measure first one of the sides perpendicular to the motion, and satisfy myself that my measure fit s this side exactly ; and indeed neither one nor other of these lengths is altered, since they are both perpendicular to the motion. I then wish to measure the other side, that parallel with the motion ; for this purpose I change the position of my measure, and turn it so as to apply it to this side. But the yard-measure, having changed its direction and having become parallel with the motion, has in its turn undergone the deformation so that, though the side is no longer a yard long, it will still fit it exactly, and I shall be aware of nothing.
What, then, I shall be asked, is the use of the hypothesis of Lorentz and Fitzgerald if no experiment can enable us to verify it? The fact is that my statement has been incomplete. I have only spoken of measurements that can be made with a yard-measure, but we can also measure a distance by the time that light takes to traverse it, on condition that we admit that the velocity of light is constant, and independent of its direction. Lorentz could have accounted for the facts by supposing that the velocity of light is greater in the direction of the earth's motion than in the perpendicular direction. He preferred to admit that the velocity is the same in the two directions, but that bodies are smaller in the former than in the latter. If the surfaces of the waves of light had undergone the same deformations as material bodies, we should never have perceived the Lorentz-Fitzgerald deformation.
In the one case as in the other, there can be no question of absolute magnitude, but of the measurement of that magnitude by means of some instrument. This instrument may be a yard-measure or the path traversed by light. It is only the relation of the magnitude to the instrument that we measure, and if this relation is altered, we have no means of knowing whether it is the magnitude or the instrument that has changed.
But what I wish to make clear is, that in this deformation the world has not remained similar to itself. Squares have become rectangles or parallelograms, circles ellipses, and spheres ellipsoids. And yet we have no means of knowing whether this deformation is real.
It is clear that we might go much further. Instead of the Lorentz-Fitzgerald deformation, with its extremely simple laws, we might imagine a deformation of any kind whatever; bodies might be deformed in accordance with any laws, as complicated as we liked, and we should not perceive it, provided all bodies without exception were deformed in accordance with the same laws. When I say all bodies without exception, I include, of course, our own bodies and the rays of light emanating from the different objects.
If we look at the world in one of those mirrors of complicated form which deform objects in an odd way, the mutual relations of the different parts of the world are not altered; if, in fact, two real objects touch, their images likewise appear to touch. In truth, when we look in such a mirror we readily perceive the deformation but it is because the real world exists beside its deformed image. And even if this real world were hidden from us, there is something which cannot be hidden, and that is ourselves. We cannot help seeing, or at least feeling, our body and our members which have not been deformed, and continue to act as measuring instruments. But if we imagine our body itself deformed, and in the same way as if it were seen in the mirror, these measuring instruments will fail us in their turn, and the deformation will no longer be able to be ascertained.
Imagine, in the same way, two universes which are the image one of the other. With each object P in the universe A, there corresponds, in the universe B, an object P1 which is its image. The co-ordinates of this image P1 are determinate functions of those of the object P ; moreover, these functions ma be of any kind whatever - I assume only that they are chosen once for all. Between the position of P and that of P1 there is a constant relation ; it matters little what that relation may be, it is enough that it should be constant. Well, these two universes will be indistinguishable. I mean to say that the former will be for its inhabitants what the second is for its own. This would be true so long as the two universes remained foreign to one another. Suppose we are inhabitants of the universe A ; we have constructed our science and particularly our geometry. During this time the inhabitants of the universe B have constructed a science, and as their world is the image of ours, their geometry will also be the image of ours, or, more accurately, it will be the same. But if one day a window were to open for us upon the universe B, we should feel contempt for them, and we should say, "These wretched people imagine that they have made a geometry, but what they so name is only a grotesque image of ours; their straight lines are all twisted, their circles are hunchbacked, and their spheres have capricious inequalities." We should have no suspicion that they were saying the same of us, and that no one will ever know which is right.
We see in how large a sense we must understand the relativity of space. Space is in reality amorphous, and it is only the things that are in it that give it a form. What are we to think, then, of that direct intuition we have of a straight line or of distance? We have so little the intuition of distance in itself that, in a single night, as we have said, a distance could become a thousand times greater without our being able to perceive it, if all other distances had undergone the same alteration. And in a night the universe B might even be substituted for the universe A without our having any means of knowing it, and then the straight lines of yesterday would have ceased to be straight, and we should not be aware of anything.
One part of space is not by itself and in the absolute sense of the word equal to another part of space, for if it is so for us, it will not be so for the inhabitants of the universe B, and they have precisely as much right to reject our opinion as we have to condemn theirs.
If this intuition of distance, of direction, of the straight line, if, in a word, this direct intuition of space does not exist, whence comes it that we imagine we have it? If this is only an illusion, whence comes it that the illusion is so tenacious ? This is what we must examine. There is no direct intuition of magnitude, as we have said, and we can only arrive at the relation of the magnitude to our measuring instruments. Accordingly we could not have constructed space if we had not had an instrument for measuring it. Well, that instrument to which we refer everything, which we use instinctively, is our own body. It is in reference to our own body that we locate exterior objects, and the only special relations of these objects that we can picture to ourselves are their relations with our body. It is our body that serves us, so to speak, as a system of axes of co-ordinates.
For instance, at a moment a the presence of an object A is revealed to me by the sense of sight; at another moment b the presence of another object B is revealed by another sense, that, for instance, of hearing or of touch. I judge that this object B occupies the same place as the object A. What does this mean? To begin with, it does not imply that these two objects occupy, at two different moments, the same point in an absolute space, which, even if it existed, would escape our knowledge, since between the moments a and P the solar system has been displaced and we cannot know what this displacement is. It means that these two objects occupy the same relative position in reference to our body.
But what is meant even by this? The impressions that have come to us from these objects have followed absolutely different paths - the optic nerve for the object A, and the acoustic nerve for the object B - they have nothing in common from the qualitative point of view.' The representations we can form of these two objects are absolutely heterogeneous and irreducible one to the other. Only I know that, in order to reach the object A, I have only to extend my right arm in a certain way; even though I refrain from doing it, I represent to myself the muscular and other analogous sensations which accompany that extension, and that representation is associated with that of the object A
Now I know equally that I can reach the object B by extending my right arm in the same way, an extension accompanied by the same train of muscular sensations. And I mean nothing else but this when I say that these two objects occupy the same position
I know also that I could have reached the object A by another appropriate movement of the left arm, and I represent to myself the muscular sensations that would have accompanied the movement. And by the same movement of the left arm, accompanied by the same sensations, I could equally have reached the object B
And this is very important, since it is in this way that I could defend myself against the dangers with which the object A or the object B might threaten me. With each of the blows that may strike us, nature has associated one or several parries which enable us to protect ourselves against them. The same parry may answer to several blows. It is thus, for instance, that the same movement of the right arm would have enabled us to defend ourselves at the moment a against the object A, and at the moment b against the object B. Similarly, the same blow may be parried in several ways, and we have said, for instance, that we could reach the object A equally well either by a certain movement of the right arm, or by a certain movement of the left
All these parries have nothing in common with one another, except that they enable us to avoid the same blow, and it is that, and nothing but that, we mean when we say that they are movements ending in the same point in space. Similarly, these objects, of which we say that they occupy the same point in space, have nothing in common, except that the same parry can enable us to defend ourselves against them.
Or, if we prefer it, let us imagine innumerable telegraph wires, some centripetal and others centrifugal. The centripetal wires warn us of accidents that occur outside, the centrifugal wires have to provide the remedy. Connections are established in such a way that when one of the centripetal wires is traversed by a current, this current acts on a central exchange, and so excites a current in one of the centrifugal wires, and matters are so arranged that several centripetal wires can act on the same centrifugal wire, if the same remedy is applicable to several evils, and that one centripetal wire can disturb several centrifugal wires, either simultaneously or one in default of the other, every time that the same evil can be cured by several remedies
It is this complex system of associations, it is this distribution board, so to speak, that is our whole geometry, or, if you will, all that is distinctive in our geometry. What we call our intuition of a straight line or of distance is the consciousness we have of these associations and of their imperious character.
Whence this imperious character itself comes, it is easy to understand. The older an association is, the more indestructible it will appear to us. But these associations are not, for the most part, conquests made by the individual, since we see traces of them in the newly-born infant they are conquests made by the race. The more necessary these conquests were, the more quickly they must have been brought about by natural selection.
On this account those we have been speaking of must have been among the earliest, since without them the defence of the organism would have been impossible. As soon as the cells were no longer merely in juxtaposition, as soon as they were called upon to give mutual assistance to each other, some such mechanism as we have been describing must necessarily have been organised in order that the assistance should meet the danger without miscarrying.
When a frog's head has been cut off, and a drop of acid is placed at some point on its skin, it tries to rub off the acid with the nearest foot; and if that foot is cut off, it removes it with the other foot. Here we have, clearly, that double parry I spoke of just now, making it possible to oppose an evil by a second remedy if the first fails. It is this multiplicity of parries, and the resulting co-ordination, that is space
We see to what depths of unconsciousness we have to descend to find the first traces of these spatial associations, since the lowest parts of the nervous system alone come into play. Once we have realised this, how can we be astonished at the resistance we oppose to any attempt to dissociate what has been so long associated? Now, it is this very resistance that we call the evidence of the truths of geometry. This evidence is nothing else than the repugnance we feel at breaking with very old habits with which we have always got on very well
The space thus created is only a small space that does not extend beyond what my arm can reach, and the intervention of memory is necessary to set back its limits. There are points that will always remain out of my reach, whatever effort I may make to stretch out my hand to them. If I were attached to the ground, like a sea-polyp, for instance, which can only extend its tentacles, all these points would be outside space, since the sensations we might experience from the action of bodies placed there would not be associated with the idea of any movement enabling us to reach them, or with any appropriate parry. These sensations would not seem to us to have any spatial character, and we should not attempt to locate them.
But we are not fixed to the ground like the inferior animals. If the enemy is too far off, we can advance upon him first and extend our hand when we are near enough. This is still a parry, but a long-distance parry. Moreover, it is a complex parry, and into the representation we make of it there enter the representation of the muscular sensations caused by the movement of the legs, that of the muscular sensations caused by the final movement of the arm, that of the sensations of the semi-circular canals, etc. Besides, we have to make a representation, not of a complexus of simultaneous sensations, but of a complexus of successive sensations, following one another in a determined order, and it is for this reason that I said just now that the intervention of memory is necessary
We must further observe that, to reach the same point, I can approach nearer the object to be attained, in order not to have to extend my hand so far. And how much more might be said? It is not one only, but a thousand parries I can oppose to. the same danger. All these parries are formed of sensations that may have nothing in common, and yet we regard them as defining the same point in space, because they can answer to the same danger and are one and all of them associated with the notion of that danger. It is the possibility of parrying the same blow which makes the unity of these different parries, just as it is the possibility of being parried in the same way which makes the unity of the blows of such different kinds that can threaten us from the same point in space. It is this double unity that makes t he individuality of each point in space, and in the notion of such a point there is nothing else but this.
The space I pictured in the preceding section, which I might call restricted space, was referred to axes of co-ordinates attached to my body. These axes were fixed, since my body did not move, and it was only my limbs that changed their position. What are the axes to which the extended space is naturally referred - that is to say, the new space I have just defined? We define a point by the succession of movements we require to make to reach it, starting from a certain initial position of the body. The axes are accordingly attached to this initial position of the body.
But the position I call initial may be arbitrarily chosen from among all the positions my body has successively occupied. If a more or less unconscious memory of these successive positions is necessary for the genesis of the notion of space, this memory can go back more or less into the past. Hence results a certain indeterminateness in the very definition of space, and it is precisely this indeterminateness which constitutes its relativity
Absolute space exists no longer; there is only space relative to a certain initial position of the body. For a conscious being, fixed to the ground like the inferior animals, who would consequently only know restricted space, space would still be relative, since it would be referred to his body, but this being would not be conscious of the relativity, because the axes to which he referred this restricted space would not change. No doubt the rock to which he was chained would not be motionless, since it would be involved in the motion of our planet; for us, consequently, these axes would change every moment, but for him they would not change. We have the faculty of referring our extended space at one time to the position A of our body considered as initial, at another to the position B which it occupied some moments later, which we are free to consider in its turn as initial, and, accordingly, we make unconscious changes in the co-ordinates every moment. This faculty would fail our imaginary being, and, through not having travelled, he would think space absolute. Every moment his system of axes would be imposed on him; this system might change to any extent in reality, for him it would be always the same, since it would always be the unique system. It is not the same for us who possess, each moment, several systems between which we can choose at will, and on condition of going back by memory more or less into the past.
That is not all, for the restricted space would not be homogeneous. The different points of this space could not be regarded as equivalent, since some could only be reached at the cost of the greatest efforts, while others could be reached with ease. On the contrary, our extended space appears to us homogeneous, and we say that all its points are equivalent. What does this mean?
If we start from a certain position A, we can, starting from that position, effect certain movements M, characterised by a certain complexus of muscular sensations. But, starting from another position B, we can execute movements M, which will be characterised by the same muscular sensations. Then let a be the situation of a certain point in the body, the tip of the forefinger of the right hand, for instance, in the initial position A, and let b be the position of this same forefinger when, starting from that position A, we have executed the movements M. Then let a1 be the situation of the forefinger in the position B, and b1 its situation when, starting from the position B, we have executed the movements M1.
Well, I am in the habit of saying that the points a and b are, in relation to each other, as the points a' and b, and that means simply that the two series of movements M and M1 are accompanied by the same muscular sensations. And as I am conscious that, in passing from the position A to the position B, my body has remained capable of the same movements, I know that there is a point in space which is to the point a' what some point b is to the point a, so that the two points a and a' are equivalent. It is this that is called the homogeneity of space, and at the same time it is for this reason that space is relative, since its properties remain the same whether they are referred to the axes A or to the axes B. So that the relativity of space and its homogeneity are one and the same thing
Now, if I wish to pass to the great space, which is no longer to serve for my individual use only, but in which I can lodge the universe I shall arrive at it by an act of imagination. I shall imagine what a giant would experience who could reach the planets in a few steps, or, if we prefer, what I should feel myself in presence of a world in miniature, in which these planets would be replaced by little balls, while on one of these little balls there would move a Lilliputian that l should call myself. But this act of imagination would be impossible for me if I had not previously constructed my restricted space and my extended space for my personal use
Now we come to the question why all these spaces have three dimensions. Let us refer to the "distribution board" spoken of above. We have, on the one side, a list of the different possible dangers - let us designate them as A1, A2, etc. - and, on the other side, the list of the different remedies, which I will call in the same way B1, B2, etc. Then we have connections between the contact studs of the first list and those of the second in such a way that when, for instance, the alarm for danger A3 works, it sets in motion or may set in motion the relay corresponding to the parry B4
As above, the centripetal or centrifugal wires, I am afraid that all I have said may be taken, not as a simple comparison, but as a description of the nervous system. Such is not my thought, and that for several reasons. Firstly, I should not presume to pronounce an opinion on the structure of the nervous system which I do not know, while those who have studied it only do so with circumspection. Secondly, because, in spite of my incompetence, I fully realise that this scheme would be far too simple. And lastly, because, on my list of parries, there appear some that are very complex, which may even, in the case of extended space, as we have seen above, consist of several steps followed by a movement of the arm. It is not a question, then, of physical connection between two real conductors, but of psychological association between two series of sensations
If A1 and A2, for instance, are both of them associated with the parry B1, and if A1 is similarly associated with B2, it will generally be the case that A2 and B2 will also be associated. If this fundamental law were not generally true, there would only be an immense confusion, and there would be nothing that could bear any resemblance to a conception of space or to a geometry. How, indeed, have we defined a point in space? We defined it in two ways: on the one hand, it is the whole of the alarms A which are in connection with the same parry B ; on the other, it is the whole of the parries B which are in connection with the same alarm A. If our law were not true, we should be obliged to say that A1 and A2 correspond with the same point, since they are both in connection with B1 ; but we should be equally obliged to say that they do not correspond with the same point, since A1 would be in connection with B2, and this would not be true of A2 - which would be a contradiction
But from another aspect, if the law were rigorously and invariably true, space would be quite different from what it is. We should have well-defined categories, among which would be apportioned the alarms A on the one side and the parries B on the other. These categories would be exceedingly numerous, but they would be entirely separated one from the other. Space would be formed of points, very numerous but discrete; it would be discontinuous. There would be no reason for arranging these points in one order rather than another, nor, consequently, for attributing three dimensions to space.
But this is not the case. May I be permitted for a moment to use the language of those who know geometry already? It is necessary that I should do so, since it is the language best understood by those to whom I wish to make myself clear. When I wish to parry the blow, I try to reach the point whence the blow comes, but it is enough if I come fairly near it. The n the parry B1 may answer to A1, and to A2 if the point which corresponds with B1 is sufficiently close both to that which corresponds with A1 and to that which corresponds with A2. But it may happen that the point which corresponds with another parry B2 is near enough to the point corresponding with A1, and not near enough to the point corresponding with A2. And so the parry B2 may answer to A1 and not be able to answer to A2.
For those who do not yet know geometry, this may be translated simply by a modification of the law enunciated above. Then what happens is as follows. Two parries, B1 and B2, are associated with one alarm A1, and with a very great number of alarms that we Will place in the same category as A1, and make to correspond with the same point in space. But we may find alarms A2 which are associated with B2 and not with B1, but on the other hand are associated with B3, which are not with A1, and so on in succession, so that we may write the sequence B1, A1, B2, A2, B3, A3, B4, A4, in which each term is associated with the succeeding and preceding terms, but not with those that are several places removed
It is unnecessary to add that each of the terms of these sequences is not isolated, but forms part of a very numerous category of other alarms or other parries which has the same connections as it, and may be regarded as belonging to the same point in space. Thus the fundamental law, though admitting of exceptions, remains almost always true. Only, in consequence of these exceptions, these categories, instead of being entirely separate, partially encroach upon each other and mutually overlap to a certain extent, so that space becomes continuous.
Furthermore, the order in which these categories must be arranged is no longer arbitrary, and a reference to the preceding sequence will make it clear that B2 must be placed between A1 and A2, and, consequently, between B1 and B3, and that it could not be placed, for instance, between B3 and B4.
Accordingly there is an order in which our categories range themselves naturally which corresponds with the points in space, and experience teaches us that this order presents itself in the form of a three-circuit distribution board, and it is for this reason that space has three dimensions
Thus the characteristic property of space that of having three dimensions, is only a property of our distribution board, a property residing, so to speak, in the human intelligence. The destruction of some of these connections that is to say of these associations of ideas, would be sufficient to give us a different distribution board, and that might be enough to endow space with a fourth dimension.
Some people will be astonished at such a result. The exterior world, they think, must surely count for something. If the number of dimensions comes from the way in which we are made, there might be thinking beings living in our world, but made differently from us, who would think that space has more or less than three dimensions. Has not M. de Cyon said that Japanese mice, having only two pairs of semicircular canals, think that space has two dimensions? Then will not this thinking being, if he is capable of constructing a physical system, make a system of two or four dimensions, which yet, in a sense, will be the same as ours, since it will be the description of the same world in another language?
It quite seems, indeed, that it would be possible to translate our physics into the language of geometry of four dimensions. Attempting such a translation would be giving oneself a great deal of trouble for little profit, and I will content myself with mentioning Hertz's mechanics, in which something of the kind may be seen. Yet it seems that the translation would always be less simple than the text, and that it would never lose the appearance of a translation, for the language of three dimensions seems the best suited to the description of our world, even though that description may be made, in case of necessity, in another idiom
Besides, it is not by chance that our distribution board has been formed. There is a connection between the alarm A1 and the parry B1, that is, a property residing in our intelligence. But why is there this connection? It is because the parry B1 enables us effectively to defend ourselves against the danger A1, and that. is a fact exterior to us, a property of the exterior world. Our distribution board, then, is only the translation of an assemblage of exterior facts; if it has three dimensions, it is because it has adapted itself to a world having certain properties, and the most important of these properties is that there exist natural solids which are clearly displaced in accordance with the laws we call laws of motion of unvarying solids. If, then, the language of three dimensions is that which enables us most easily to describe our world, we must not be surprised. This language is founded on our distribution board, and it is in order to. enable us to live in this world that this board has been established.
Haing said that we could conceive of thinking beings, living in our world, whose distribution board would have four dimensions, who would, consequently, think in hyper- space. It is not certain, however, that such beings, admitting that,, they were born, would be able to live and defend 'themselves against the thousand dangers by which they would be assailed
There is a striking contrast between the roughness of this primitive geometry which is reduced to what I call a distribution board, and the infinite precision of the geometry of geometricians. And yet the latter is the child of the former, but not of it alone; it required to be fertilised by the faculty we have of constructing mathematical concepts, such, for instance, as that of the group. It was necessary to find among these pure concepts the one that was best adapted to this rough space, whose genesis I have tried to explain in the preceding pages, the space which is common to us and the higher animals
The evidence of certain 'geometrical postulates is only, as I have said, our unwillingness to give up very old habits. But these postulates are infinitely precise, while the habits have about them something essentially fluid. As soon as we wish to think, we are bound to have infinitely precise postulates, since this is the only means of avoiding contradiction. But among all the possible systems of postulates, there are some that we shall be unwilling to choose, because they do not accord sufficiently with our habits. However fluid and elastic these may be, they have a limit of elasticity.
It will be seen that though geometry is not an experimental science, it is a science born in connection with experience; that we have created the space it studies, but adapting it to the world in which we live. We have chosen the most convenient space, but experience guided our choice. As the choice was unconscious, it appears to be imposed upon us. Some say that it is imposed by experience, and others that we are born with our space ready-made. After the preceding considerations, it will be seen what proportion of truth and of error there is - in these two opinions
In this progressive education which has resulted in the construction of space, it is very difficult to determine what is the share of the individual and what of the race. To what extent could one of us, transported from his birth into an entirely different world, where, for instance, there existed bodies displaced in accordance with the laws of motion of non-Euclidean solids - to what extent, I say, would he be able to give up the ancestral space in order to build up an entirely new space?
The share of the race seems to preponderate largely, and yet if it is to it that we owe the rough space, the fluid space of which I spoke just now, the space of the higher animals, is it not to the unconscious experience of the individual that we owe the infinitely precise space of the geometrician? This is a question that is not easy of solution, least of mention, a fact which shows that the space bequeathed to us by our ancestors still preserves a certain elasticity. Certain hunters learn to shoot fish under the water, although the image of these fish is raised by refraction ; and, moreover, they do it instinctively. Accordingly they have learnt to modify their ancient instinct of direction, or, if you will, to substitute for the association A1, B1, another association A1, B2, because experience has shown them that the former does not succeed.
The first scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, allowed scientists to better them in the understudy of how the classical paradigm in physical reality has marked results in the stark Cartesian division between mind and world that became one of the most characteristic features of Western thought. This is not, however, another strident and ill-mannered diatribe against our misunderstandings, but drawn upon equivalent self realization and undivided wholeness or predicted characterlogic principles of physical reality and the epistemological foundations of physical theory.
The subjectivity of our mind affects our perceptions of the world that is held to be objective by natural science. Create both aspects of mind and matter as individualized forms that belong to the same underlying reality.
Our everyday experience confirms the apparent fact that there is a dual-valued world as subject and objects. We as having consciousness, as personality and as experiencing beings are the subjects, whereas for everything for which we can come up with a name or designation, seems to be the object, that which is opposed to us as a subject. Physical objects are only part of the object-world. There are also mental objects, objects of our emotions, abstract objects, religious objects etc. language objectifies our experience. Experiences per se are purely sensational experienced that do not make a distinction between object and subject. Only verbalized thought reifies the sensations by conceptualizing them and pigeonholing them into the given entities of language.
Some thinkers maintain, that subject and object are only different aspects of experience. I can experience myself as subject, and in the act of self-reflection. The fallacy of this argument is obvious: Being a subject implies having an object. We cannot experience something consciously without the mediation of understanding and mind. Our experience is already conceptualized at the time it comes into our consciousness. Our experience is negative insofar as it destroys the original pure experience. In a dialectical process of synthesis, the original pure experience becomes an object for us. The common state of our mind is only capable of apperceiving objects. Objects are reified negative experience. The same is true for the objective aspect of this theory: by objectifying myself I do not dispense with the subject, but the subject is causally and apodeictically linked to the object. As soon as I make an object of anything, I have to realize, that it is the subject, which objectifies something. It is only the subject who can do that. Without the subject there are no objects, and without objects there is no subject. This interdependence, however, is not to be understood in terms of a dualism, so that the object and the subject are really independent substances. Since the object is only created by the activity of the subject, and the subject is not a physical entity, but a mental one, we have to conclude then, that the subject-object dualism is purely mentalistic.
The Cartesian dualism posits the subject and the object as separate, independent and real substances, both of which have their ground and origin in the highest substance of God. Cartesian dualism, however, contradicts itself: The very fact, which Descartes posits the "I,” that is the subject, as the only certainty, he defied materialism, and thus the concept of some "res extensa.” The physical thing is only probable in its existence, whereas the mental thing is absolutely and necessarily certain. The subject is superior to the object. The object is only derived, but the subject is the original. This makes the object not only inferior in its substantive quality and in its essence, but relegates it to a level of dependence on the subject. The subject recognizes that the object is a "res extensa" and this means, that the object cannot have essence or existence without the acknowledgment through the subject. The subject posits the world in the first place and the subject is posited by God. Apart from the problem of interaction between these two different substances, Cartesian dualism is not eligible for explaining and understanding the subject-object relation.
By denying Cartesian dualism and resorting to monistic theories such as extreme idealism, materialism or positivism, the problem is not resolved either. What the positivists did, was just verbalizing the subject-object relation by linguistic forms. It was no longer a metaphysical problem, but only a linguistic problem. Our language has formed this object-subject dualism. These thinkers are very superficial and shallow thinkers, because they do not see that in the very act of their analysis they inevitably think in the mind-set of subject and object. By relativizing the object and subject in terms of language and analytical philosophy, they avoid the elusive and problematical oppure of subject-object, since which has been the fundamental question in philosophy ever. Shunning these metaphysical questions is no solution. Excluding something, by reducing it to a more material and verifiable level, is not only pseudo-philosophy but actually a depreciation and decadence of the great philosophical ideas of mankind.
Therefore, we have to come to grips with idea of subject-object in a new manner. We experience this dualism as a fact in our everyday lives. Every experience is subject to this dualistic pattern. The question, however, is, whether this underlying pattern of subject-object dualism is real or only mental. Science assumes it to be real. This assumption does not prove the reality of our experience, but only that with this method science is most successful in explaining our empirical facts. Mysticism, on the other hand, believes that there is an original unity of subject and objects. To attain this unity is the goal of religion and mysticism. Man has fallen from this unity by disgrace and by sinful behaviour. Now the task of man is to get back on track again and strive toward this highest fulfilment. Again, are we not, on the conclusion made above, forced to admit, that also the mystic way of thinking is only a pattern of the mind and, as the scientists, that they have their own frame of reference and methodology to explain the supra-sensible facts most successfully?
If we assume mind to be the originator of the subject-object dualism, then we cannot confer more reality on the physical or the mental aspect, as well as we cannot deny the one in terms of the other.
The crude language of the earliest users of symbolics must have been considerably gestured and nonsymbiotic vocalizations. Their spoken language probably became reactively independent and a closed cooperative system. Only after the emergence of hominids were to use symbolic communication evolved, symbolic forms progressively took over functions served by non-vocal symbolic forms. This is reflected in modern languages. The structure of syntax in these languages often reveals its origins in pointing gestures, in the manipulation and exchange of objects, and in more primitive constructions of spatial and temporal relationships. We still use nonverbal vocalizations and gestures to compliment meaning in spoken language.
The general idea is very powerful, however, the relevance of spatiality to self-consciousness comes about not merely because the world is spatial but also because the self-conscious subject is a spatial element of the world. One cannot be self-conscious without being aware that one is a spatial element of the world, and one cannot be ware that one is a spatial element of the world without a grasp of the spatial nature of the world. Face to face, the idea of a perceivable, objective spatial world that causes ideas too subjectively becoming to denote in the wold. During which time, his perceptions as they have of changing position within the world and to the more or less stable way the world is. The idea that there is an objective world and the idea that the subject is somewhere, and where he is given by what he can perceive.
Research, however distant, are those that neuroscience reveals in that the human brain is a massive parallel system which language processing is widely distributed. Computers generated images of human brains engaged in language processing reveals a hierarchal organization consisting of complicated clusters of brain areas that process different component functions in controlled time sequences. Language processing is clearly not accomplished by stand-alone or unitary modules that evolved with the addition of separate modules that were eventually wired together on some neutral circuit board.
While the brain that evolved this capacity was obviously a product of Darwinian evolution, the most critical precondition for the evolution of this brain cannot be simply explained in these terms. Darwinian evolution can explain why the creation of stone tools altered conditions for survival in a new ecological niche in which group living, pair bonding, and more complex social structures were critical to survival. Darwinian evolution can also explain why selective pressures in this new ecological niche favoured pre-adaptive changes required for symbolic communication. All the same, this communication resulted directly through its passing an increasingly atypically structural complex and intensively condensed behaviour. Social evolution began to take precedence over physical evolution in the sense that mutations resulting in enhanced social behaviour became selectively advantageously within the context of the social behaviour of hominids.
Because this communication was based on symbolic vocalization that required the evolution of neural mechanisms and processes that did not evolve in any other species. As this marked the emergence of a mental realm that would increasingly appear as separate and distinct from the external material realm.
If the emergent reality in this mental realm cannot be reduced to, or entirely explained as for, the sum of its parts, concluding that this reality is greater than the sum of its parts seems reasonable. For example, a complete proceeding of the manner in which light in particular wave lengths has ben advancing by the human brain to generate a particular colour says nothing about the experience of colour. In other words, a complete scientific description of all the mechanisms involved in processing the colour blue does not correspond with the colour blue as perceived in human consciousness. No scientific description of the physical substrate of a thought or feeling, no matter how accomplish it can but be accounted for in actualized experience, especially of a thought or feeling, as an emergent aspect of global brain function.
If we could, for example, define all of the neural mechanisms involved in generating a particular word symbol, this would reveal nothing about the experience of the word symbol as an idea in human consciousness. Conversely, the experience of the word symbol as an idea would reveal nothing about the neuronal processes involved. While one mode of understanding the situation necessarily displaces the other, both are required to achieve a complete understanding of the situation.
Even if we are to include two aspects of biological reality, finding to a more complex order in biological reality is associated with the emergence of new wholes that are greater than the orbital parts. Yet, the entire biosphere is of a whole that displays self-regulating behaviour that is greater than the sum of its parts. The emergence of a symbolic universe based on a complex language system could be viewed as another stage in the evolution of more complicated and complex systems. As marked and noted by the appearance of a new profound complementarity in relationships between parts and wholes. This does not allow us to assume that human consciousness was in any sense preordained or predestined by natural process. Thus far it does make it possible, in philosophical terms at least, to argue that this consciousness is an emergent aspect of the self-organizing properties of biological life.
If we also concede that an indivisible whole contains, by definition, no separate parts and that a phenomenon can be assumed to be “real” only when it is “observed” phenomenon, we are led to more interesting conclusions. The indivisible whole whose existence is inferred in the results of the aspectual experiments that cannot in principle is itself the subject of scientific investigation. There is a simple reason that this is the case. Science can claim knowledge of physical reality only when the predictions of a physical theory are validated by experiment. Since the indivisible whole cannot be measured or observed, we confront as the “event horizon” or knowledge where science can say nothing about the actual character of this reality. Why this is so, is a property of the entire universe, then we must also conclude that an undivided wholeness exists on the most primary and basic level in all aspects of physical reality. What we are dealing within science per se, however, are manifestations of tis reality, which are invoked or “actualized” in making acts of observation or measurement. Since the reality that exists between the space-like separated regions is a whole whose existence can only be inferred in experience. As opposed to proven experiment, the correlations between the particles, and the sum of these parts, do not constitute the “indivisible” whole. Physical theory allows us to understand why the correlations occur. Nevertheless, it cannot in principle disclose or describe the actualized character of the indivisible whole.
The scientific implications to this extraordinary relationship between parts (qualia) and indivisible whole (the universe) are quite staggering. Our primary concern, however, is a new view of the relationship between mind and world that carries even larger implications in human terms. When factors into our understanding of the relationship between parts and wholes in physics and biology, then mind, or human consciousness, must be viewed as an emergent phenomenon in a seamlessly interconnected whole called the cosmos.
All that is required to embrace the alternative view of the relationship between mind and world that are consistent with our most advanced scientific knowledge is a commitment to metaphysical and epistemological realism and a willingness to follow arguments to their logical conclusions. Metaphysical realism assumes that physical reality or has an actual existence independent of human observers or any act of observation, epistemological realism assumes that progress in science requires strict adherence to scientific mythology, or to the rules and procedures for doing science. If one can accept these assumptions, most of the conclusions drawn should appear self-evident in logical and philosophical terms. Attributing any extra-scientific properties to the whole to understand is also not necessary and embrace the new relationship between part and whole and the alternative view of human consciousness that is consistent with this relationship. This is, in this that our distinguishing character between what can be “proven” in scientific terms and what can be reasonably “inferred” in philosophical terms based on the scientific evidence.
Moreover, advances in scientific knowledge rapidly became the basis for the creation of a host of new technologies. Yet those responsible for evaluating the benefits and risks associated with the use of these technologies, much less their potential impact on human needs and values, normally had expertise on only one side of a two-culture divide. Perhaps, more important, many of the potential threats to the human future - such as, to, environmental pollution, arms development, overpopulation, and spread of infectious diseases, poverty, and starvation - can be effectively solved only by integrating scientific knowledge with knowledge from the social sciences and humanities. We have not done so for a simple reason, the implications of the amazing new fact of nature sustaining the non-locality that cannot be properly understood without some familiarity wit the actual history of scientific thought. The intent is to suggest that what is most important about this back-ground can be understood in its absence. Those who do not wish to struggle with the small and perhaps, the fewer amounts of back-ground implications should feel free to ignore it. However, this material will be no more challenging as such, that the hope is that from those of which will find a common ground for understanding and that will meet again on this commonly functions in an effort to close the circle, resolves the equations of eternity and complete the universe to obtainably gain in its unification of which that holds within.
Another aspect of the evolution of a brain that allowed us to construct symbolic universes based on complex language system that is particularly relevant for our purposes concerns consciousness of self. Consciousness of self as an independent agency or actor is predicted on a fundamental distinction or dichotomy between this self and the other selves. Self, as it is constructed in human subjective reality, is perceived as having an independent existence and a self-referential character in a mental realm separately distinct from the material realm. It was, the assumed separation between these realms that led Descartes to posit his famous dualism in understanding the nature of consciousness in the mechanistic classical universe.
In a thought experiment, instead of bringing a course of events, as in a normal experiment, we are invited to imagine one. We may then be able to “see” that some result following, or tat some description is appropriate, or our inability to describe the situation may itself have some consequences. Thought experiments played a major role in the development of physics: For example, Galileo probably never dropped two balls of unequal weight from the leaning Tower of Pisa, in order to refute the Aristotelean view that a heavy body falls faster than a lighter one. He merely asked used to imagine a heavy body made into the shape of a dumbbell, and then connecting rod gradually thinner, until it is finally severed. The thing is one heavy body until the last moment and he n two light ones, but it is incredible that this final outline alters the velocity dramatically. Other famous examples include the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen thought experiment. In the philosophy of personal identity, our apparent capacity to imagine ourselves surviving drastic changes of body, brain, and mind is a permanent source of difficulty. There is no consensus on the legitimate place of thought experiments, to substitute either for real experiment, or as a reliable device for discerning possibilities. Thought experiments are alike of one that dislikes and are sometimes called intuition pumps.
For familiar reasons, supposing that people are characterized by their rationality is common, and the most evident display of our rationality is our capacity to think. This is the rehearsal in the mind of what to say, or what to do. Not all thinking is verbal, since chess players, composers and painters all think, and there is no a priori reason that their deliberations should take any more verbal a form than this actions. It is permanently tempting to conceive of this activity in terms of the presence in the mind of elements of some language, or other medium that represents aspects of the world. Still, the model has been attacked, notably by Wittgenstein, as insufficient, since no such presence could carry a guarantee that the right use would be made of it. Such an inner present seems unnecessary, since an intelligent outcome might arise in principle weigh out it.
In the philosophy of mind as well as ethics the treatment of animals exposes major problems if other animals differ from human beings, how is the difference to be characterized: Do animals think and reason, or have thoughts and beliefs? In philosophers as different as Aristotle and Kant the possession of reason separates humans from animals, and alone allows entry to the moral community.
For Descartes, animals are mere machines and ee lack consciousness or feelings. In the ancient world the rationality of animals is defended with the example of Chrysippus’ dog. This animal, tracking a prey, comes to a cross-roads with three exits, and without pausing to pick-up the scent, reasoning, according to Sextus Empiricus. The animal went either by this road, or by this road, or by that, or by the other. However, it did not go by this or that, but he went the other way. The ‘syllogism of the dog’ was discussed by many writers, since in Stoic cosmology animals should occupy a place on the great chain of being somewhat below human beings, the only terrestrial rational agents: Philo Judaeus wrote a dialogue attempting to show again Alexander of Aphrodisias that the dog’s behaviour does no t exhibit rationality, but simply shows it following the scent, by way of response Alexander has the animal jump down a shaft (where the scent would not have lingered). Plutah sides with Philo, Aquinas discusses the dog and scholastic thought in general was quite favourable to brute intelligence (being made to stand trail for various offences in medieval times was common for animals). In the modern era Montaigne uses the dog to remind us of the frailties of human reason: Rorarious undertook to show not only that beasts are rational, but that they make better use of reason than people do. James the first of England defends the syllogising dog, and Henry More and Gassendi both takes issue with Descartes on that matter. Hume is an outspoken defender of animal cognition, but with their use of the view that language is the essential manifestation of mentality, animals’ silence began to count heavily against them, and they are completely denied thoughts by, for instance Davidson.
Dogs are frequently shown in pictures of philosophers, as their assiduity and fidelity are a symbol
The term instinct (Lat., instinctus, impulse or urge) implies innately determined behaviour, flexible to change in circumstance outside the control of deliberation and reason. The view that animals accomplish even complex tasks not by reason was common to Aristotle and the Stoics, and the inflexibility of their outline was used in defence of this position as early as Avicennia. A continuity between animal and human reason was proposed by Hume, and followed by sensationalist such as the naturalist Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802). The theory of evolution prompted various views of the emergence of stereotypical behaviour, and the idea that innate determinants of behaviour are fostered by specific environments is a guiding principle of ethology. In this sense that being social may be instinctive in human beings, and for that matter too reasoned on what we now know about the evolution of human language abilities, however, our real or actualized self is clearly not imprisoned in our minds.
It is implicitly a part of the larger whole of biological life, human observers its existence from embedded relations to this whole, and constructs its reality as based on evolved mechanisms that exist in all human brains. This suggests that any sense of the “otherness” of self and world be is an illusion, in that disguises of its own actualization are to find all its relations between the part that are of their own characterization. Its self as related to the temporality of being whole is that of a biological reality. It can be viewed, of course, that a proper definition of this whole must not include the evolution of the larger undissectible whole. Yet, the cosmos and unbroken evolution of all life, by that of the first self-replication molecule that was the ancestor of DNA. It should include the complex interactions that have proven that among all the parts in biological reality that any resultant of emerging is self-regulating. This, of course, is responsible to properties owing to the whole of what might be to sustain the existence of the parts.
Founded on complications and complex coordinate systems in ordinary language may be conditioned as to establish some developments have been descriptively made by its physical reality and metaphysical concerns. That is, that it is in the history of mathematics and that the exchanges between the mega-narratives and frame tales of religion and science were critical factors in the minds of those who contributed. The first scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, allowed scientists to better them in the understudy of how the classical paradigm in physical reality has marked results in the stark Cartesian division between mind and world that became one of the most characteristic features of Western thought. This is not, however, another strident and ill-mannered diatribe against our misunderstandings, but drawn upon equivalent self realization and undivided wholeness or predicted characterlogic principles of physical reality and the epistemological foundations of physical theory.
Scientific knowledge is an extension of ordinary language into greater levels of abstraction and precision through reliance upon geometry and numerical relationships. We imagine that the seeds of the scientific imagination were planted in ancient Greece. This, of course, opposes any other option but to speculate some displacement afar from the Chinese or Babylonian cultures. Partly because the social, political, and economic climates in Greece were more open in the pursuit of knowledge along with greater margins that reflect upon cultural accessibility. Another important factor was that the special character of Homeric religion allowed the Greeks to invent a conceptual framework that would prove useful in future scientific investigations. However, it was only after this inheritance from Greek philosophy was wedded to some essential feature of Judeo-Christian beliefs about the origin of the cosmos that the paradigm for classical physics emerged.
The Greek philosophers we now recognized as the originator’s scientific thoughts were oraclically mystic who probably perceived their world as replete with spiritual agencies and forces. The Greek religious heritage made it possible for these thinkers to attempt to coordinate diverse physical events within a framework of immaterial and unifying ideas. The fundamental assumption that there is a pervasive, underlying substance out of which everything emerges and into which everything returns are attributed to Thales of Miletos. Thales had apparently transcended to this conclusion out of the belief that the world was full of gods, and his unifying substance, water, was similarly charged with spiritual presence. Religion in this instance served the interests of science because it allowed the Greek philosophers to view “essences” underlying and unifying physical reality as if they were “substances.”
Nonetheless, the belief that the mind of God as the Divine Architect permeates the workings of nature. All of which, is the principle of scientific thought, as pronounced through Johannes Kepler, and subsequently to most contemporaneous physicists, as the consigned probability can feel of some discomfort, that in reading Kepler’s original manuscripts. Physics and metaphysics, astronomy and astrology, geometry and theology commingle with an intensity that might offend those who practice science in the modern sense of that word. “Physical laws,” wrote Kepler, “lie within the power of understanding of the human mind, God wanted us to perceive them when he created us in His image so that we may take part in His own thoughts . . . Our knowledge of numbers and quantities are the same as that of God’s, at least as far as we can understand something of it in this mortal life.”
The history of science grandly testifies to the manner in which scientific objectivity results in physical theories that must be assimilated into “customary points of view and forms of perception.” The framers of classical physics derived, like the rest of us there, “customary points of view and forms of perception” from macro-level visualized experience. Thus, the descriptive apparatus of visualizable experience became reflected in the classical descriptive categories.
A major discontinuity appears, however, as we moved from descriptive apparatus dominated by the character of our visualizable experience to a complete description of physical reality in relativistic and quantum physics. The actual character of physical reality in modern physics lies largely outside the range of visualizable experience. Einstein, was acutely aware of this discontinuity: “We have forgotten what features of the world of experience caused us to frame pre-scientific concepts, and we have great difficulty in representing the world of experience to ourselves without the spectacles of the old-established conceptual interpretation. There is the further difficulty that our language is compelled to work with words that are inseparably connected with those primitive concepts.”
It is time, for the religious imagination and the religious experience to engage the complementary truths of science in filling that which is silence with meaning. However, this does not mean that those who do not believe in the existence of God or Being should refrain in any sense for assessing the implications of the new truths of science. Understanding these implications does not require to some ontology, and is in no way diminished by the lack of ontology. And one is free to recognize a basis for an exchange between science and religion since one is free to deny that this basis exists - there is nothing in our current scientific world-view that can prove the existence of God or Being and nothing that legitimate any anthropomorphic conceptions of the nature of God or Being. The question of belief in onology remains what it has always been - a question, and the physical universe on the most basic level remains what has always been - a riddle. And the ultimate answer to the question and the ultimate meaning of the riddle are, and probably will always be, a mater of personal choice and conviction.
Our frame reference work is mostly to incorporate in an abounding set-class affiliation between mind and world, by that lay to some defining features and fundamental preoccupations, for which there is certainly nothing new in the suggestion that contemporary scientific world-view legitimates an alternate conception of the relationship between mind and world. The essential point of attention is that one of “consciousness” and remains in a certain state of our study.
But at the end of this, sometimes labourious journey that precipitate to some conclusion that should make the trip very worthwhile. Initiatory comments offer resistance in contemporaneous physics or biology for believing “I” in the stark Cartesian division between mind and world that some have rather aptly described as “the disease of the Western mind.” In addition, let us consider the legacy in Western intellectual life of the stark division between mind and world sanctioned by René Descartes.
Descartes, the father of modern philosophy, inasmuch as he made epistemological questions the primary and central questions of the discipline. But this is misleading for several reasons. In the first, Descartes conception of philosophy was very different from our own. The term “philosophy” in the seventeenth century was far more comprehensive than it is today, and embraced the whole of what we nowadays call natural science, including cosmology and physics, and subjects like anatomy, optics and medicine. Descartes reputation as a philosopher in his own time was based as much as anything on his contributions in these scientific areas. Secondly, even in those Cartesian writings that are philosophical in the modern academic sense, the e epistemological concerns are rather different from the conceptual and linguistic inquiries that characterize present-day theory of knowledge. Descartes saw the need to base his scientific system on secure metaphysical foundations: By “metaphysics” he meant that in the queries into God and the soul and usually all the first things to be discovered by philosophizing. Yet, he was quick to realize that there was nothing in this view that provided untold benefits between heaven and earth and united the universe in a shared and communicable frame of knowledge, it presented us with a view of physical reality that was totally alien from the world of everyday life. Even so, there was nothing in this view of nature that could explain or provide a foundation for the mental, or for all that of direct experience as distinctly human, with no ups, downs or any which ways of direction.
Following these fundamentals’ explorations that include questions about knowledge and certainty, but even here, Descartes is not primarily concerned with the criteria for knowledge claims, or with definitions of the epistemic concepts involved, as his aim is to provide a unified framework for understanding the universe. And with this, Descartes was convinced that the immaterial essences that gave form and structure to this universe were coded in geometrical and mathematical ideas, and this insight led him to invented algebraic geometry.
A scientific understanding to these ideas could be derived, as did that Descartes declared, that with the aid of precise deduction, and he also claimed that the contours of physical reality could be laid out in three-dimensional coordinates. Following the publication of Isaac Newton’s “Principia Mathematica” in 1687, reductionism and mathematical modelling became the most powerful tools of modern science. And the dream that the entire physical world could be known and mastered through the extension and refinement of mathematical theory became the central feature and principle of scientific knowledge.
The radical separation between mind and nature formalized by Descartes served over time to allow scientists to concentrate on developing mathematical descriptions of matter as pure mechanisms lacking any concerns about its spiritual dimension or ontological foundations. Meanwhile, attempts to rationalize, reconcile, or eliminate Descartes’s stark division between mind and matter became perhaps the most central feature of Western intellectual life.
As in the view of the relationship between mind and world sanctioned by classical physics and formalized by Descartes became a central preoccupation in Western intellectual life. And the tragedy of the Western mind is that we have lived since the seventeenth century with the prospect that the inner world of human consciousness and the outer world of physical reality are separated by an abyss or a void that cannot be bridged or to agree with reconciliation.
In classical physics, external reality consisted of inert and inanimate matter moving according to wholly deterministic natural laws, and collections of discrete atomized parts made up wholes. Classical physics was also premised, however, a dualistic conception of reality as consisting of abstract disembodied ideas existing in a domain separate form and superior to sensible objects and movements. The notion that the material world experienced by the senses was inferior to the immaterial world experienced by mind or spirit has been blamed for frustrating the progress of physics up too at least the time of Galileo. But in one very important respect, it also made the first scientific revolution possible. Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton firmly believed that the immaterial geometrical and mathematical ideas that inform physical reality had a prior existence in the mind of God and that doing physics was a form of communion with these ideas.
The tragedy of the Western mind is a direct consequence of the stark Cartesian division between mind and world. This is the tragedy of the modern mind which “solved the riddle of the universe,” but only to replace it by another riddle: The riddle of itself. Yet, we discover the “certain principles of physical reality,” said Descartes, “not by the prejudices of the senses, but by rational analysis, which thus possess so great evidence that we cannot doubt of their truth.” Since the real, or that which actually remains external to ourselves, was in his view only that which could be represented in the quantitative terms of mathematics, Descartes concluded that all qualitative aspects of reality could be traced to the deceitfulness of the senses.
Given that Descartes distrusted the information from the senses to the point of doubting the perceived results of repeatable scientific experiments, how did he conclude that our knowledge of the mathematical ideas residing only in mind or in human subjectivity was accurate, much less the absolute truth? He did so by making a leap of faith - God constructed the world, said Descartes, according to the mathematical ideas that our minds could uncover in their pristine essence. The truths of classical physics as Descartes viewed them were quite literally “revealed” truths, and it was this seventeenth-century metaphysical presupposition that became in the history of science what is termed the “hidden ontology of classical epistemology.” Descartes lingers in the widespread conviction that science does not provide a “place for man” or for all that we know as distinctly human in subjective reality.
The historical notion in the unity of consciousness has had an interesting history in philosophy and psychology. Taking Descartes to be the first major philosopher of the modern period, the unity of consciousness was central to the study of the mind for the whole of the modern period until the 20th century. The notion figured centrally in the work of Descartes, Leibniz, Hume, Reid, Kant, Brennan, James, and, in most of the major precursors of contemporary philosophy of mind and cognitive psychology. It played a particularly important role in Kant's work.
A couple of examples will illustrate the role that the notion of the unity of consciousness played in this long literature. Consider a classical argument for dualism (the view that the mind is not the body, indeed is not made out of matter at all). It starts like this: When I consider the mind, which is to say of myself, as far as I am only a thinking thing, I cannot distinguish in myself any parts, but apprehend myself to be clearly one and entire.
Descartes then asserts that if the mind is not made up of parts, it cannot consist of matter, presumably because, as he saw it, anything material has parts. He then goes on to say that this would be enough to prove dualism by itself, had he not already proved it elsewhere. It is in the unified consciousness that I have of myself.
Here is another, more elaborate argument based on unified consciousness. The conclusion will be that any system of components could never achieve unified consciousness acting in concert. William James' well-known version of the argument starts as follows: Take a sentence of a dozen words, take twelve men, and to each word. Then stand the men in a row or jam them in a bunch, and let each think of his word as intently as he will; Nowhere will there be a consciousness of the whole sentence.
James generalizes this observation to all conscious states. To get dualism out of this, we need to add a premise: That if the mind were made out of matter, conscious states would have to be distributed over some group of components in some relevant way. Nevertheless, this thought experiment is meant to show that conscious states cannot be so distributed. Therefore, the conscious mind is not made out of matter. Calling the argument that James is using is the Unity Argument. Clearly, the idea that our consciousness of, here, the parts of a sentence are unified is at the centre of the Unity Argument. Like the first, this argument goes all the way back to Descartes. Versions of it can be found in thinkers otherwise as different from one another as Leibniz, Reid, and James. The Unity Argument continued to be influential into the 20th century. That the argument was considered a powerful reason for concluding that the mind is not the body is illustrated in a backhanded way by Kant's treatment of it (as he found it in Descartes and Leibniz, not James, of course).
Kant did not think that we could uncover anything about the nature of the mind, including whether nor is it made out of matter. To make the case for this view, he had to show that all existing arguments that the mind is not material do not work and he set out to do just this in the chapter in the Critique of Pure Reason on the Paralogisms of Pure Reason (1781), paralogisms are faulty inferences about the nature of the mind. The Unity Argument is the target of a major part of that chapter; if one is going to show that we cannot know what the mind is like, we must dispose of the Unity Argument, which purports to show that the mind is not made out of matter. Kant's argument that the Unity Argument does not support dualism is simple. He urges that the idea of unified consciousness being achieved by something that has no parts or components are no less mysterious than its being achieved by a system of components acting together. Remarkably enough, though no philosopher has ever met this challenge of Kant's and no account exists of what an immaterial mind not made out of parts might be like, philosophers continued to rely on the Unity Argument until well into the 20th century. It may be a bit difficult for us to capture this now but the idea any system of components, and for an even stronger reason might not realize that merge with consciousness, that each system of material components, had a strong intuitive appeal for a long time.
The notion that consciousness agrees to unification and was in addition central to one of Kant's own famous arguments, his ‘transcendental deduction of the categories’. In this argument, boiled down to its essentials, Kant claims that to tie various objects of experience together into a single unified conscious representation of the world, something that he simply assumed that we could do, we could probably apply certain concepts to the items in question. In particular we have to apply concepts from each of four fundamental categories of concept: Quantitative, qualitative, relational, and what he called ‘modal’ concepts. Modal concept’s concern of whether an item might exist, does exist, or must exist. Thus, the four kinds of concept are concepts for how many units, what features, what relations to other objects, and what existence status is represented in an experience.
It was relational conceptual representation that most interested Kant and of relational concepts, he thought the concept of cause-and-effect to be by far the most important. Kant wanted to show that natural science (which for him meant primarily physics) was genuine knowledge (he thought that Hume's sceptical treatment of cause and effect relations challenged this status). He believed that if he could prove that we must tie items in our experience together causally if we are to have a unified awareness of them, he would have put physics back on "the secure path of a science.” The details of his argument have exercised philosophers for more than two hundred years. We will not go into them here, but the argument illustrates how central the notion of the unity of consciousness was in Kant's thinking about the mind and its relation to the world.
Although the unity of consciousness had been at the centre of pre-20th century research on the mind, early in the 20th century the notion almost disappeared. Logical atomism in philosophy and behaviourism in psychology were both unsympathetic to the notion. Logical atomism focussed on the atomic elements of cognition (sense data, simple propositional judgments, etc.), rather than on how these elements are tied together to form a mind. Behaviourism urged that we focus on behaviour, the mind being alternatively myth or something otherwise that we cannot and do not need of studying the mysteriousness of science, from which brings meaning and purpose to humanity. This attitude extended to consciousness, of course. The philosopher Daniel Dennett summarizes the attitude prevalent at the time this way: Consciousness may be the last bastion of occult properties, epiphenomena, immeasurable subjective states - in short, the one area of mind best left to the philosophers. Let them make fools of themselves trying to corral the quicksilver of ‘phenomenology’ into a respectable theory.
The unity of consciousness next became an object of serious attention in analytic philosophy only as late as the 1960s. In the years since, new work has appeared regularly. The accumulated literature is still not massive but the unity of consciousness has again become an object of serious study. Before we examine the more recent work, we need to explicate the notion in more detail than we have done so far and introduce some empirical findings. Both are required to understand recent work on the issue.
To expand on our earlier notion of the unity of consciousness, we need to introduce a pair of distinctions. Current works on consciousness labours under a huge, confusing terminology. Different theorists exchange dialogue over the excess consciousness, phenomenal consciousness, self-consciousness, simple consciousness, creature consciousness, states consciousness, monitoring consciousness, awareness as equated with consciousness, awareness distinguished from consciousness, higher orders thought, higher orders experience, qualia, the felt qualities of representations, consciousness as displaced perception, . . . and on and on and on. We can ignore most of this profusion but we do need two distinctions: between consciousness of objects and consciousness of our representations of objects, and between consciousness of representations and consciousness of self.
It is very natural to think of self-consciousness or, cognitive state more accurately, as a set of cognitive states. Self-knowledge is an example of such a cognitive state. There are plenty of things that I know bout self. I know the sort of thing I am: a human being, a warm-blooded rational animal with two legs. I know of many properties and much of what is happening to me, at both physical and mental levels. I also know things about my past, things I have done and that of whom I have been with other people I have met. But I have many self-conscious cognitive states that are not instances of knowledge. For example, I have the capacity to plan for the future - to weigh up possible courses of action in the light of goals, desires, and ambitions. I am capable of ca certain type of moral reflection, tide to moral self-and understanding and moral self-evaluation. I can pursue questions like, what sort of person I am? Am I the sort of person I want to be? Am I the sort of individual that I ought to be? This is my ability to think about myself. Of course, much of what I think when I think about myself in these self-conscious ways is also available to me to employing in my thought about other people and other objects.
When I say that I am a self-conscious creature, I am saying that I can do all these things. But what do they have in common? Could I lack some and still be self-conscious? These are central questions that take us to the heart of many issues in metaphysics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of psychology.
Even so, with the range of putatively self-conscious cognitive states, one might naturally assume that there is a single ability that all presuppose. This is my ability to think about myself. I can only have knowledge about myself if I have beliefs about myself, and I can only have beliefs about myself if I can entertain thoughts about myself. The same can be said for autobiographical memories and moral self-understanding.
The proposing account would be on par with other noted examples of the deflationary account of self-consciousness. If, in at all, a straightforward explanation to what makes those of the “self contents” immune to error through misidentification concerning the semantics of self, then it seems fair to say that the problem of self-consciousness has been dissolved, at least as much as solved.
This proposed account would be on a par with other noted examples as such as the redundancy theory of truth. That is to say, the redundancy theory or the deflationary view of truth claims that the predicate ‘ . . . true’ does not have a sense, i.e., expresses no substantive or profound or explanatory concept that ought to be the topic of philosophic enquiry. The approach admits of different versions, but centres on the pints (1) that ‘it is true that p’ says no more nor less than ‘p’ (so, redundancy”) (2) that in less direct context, such as ‘everything he said was true’, or ‘all logical consequences of true propositions as true’, the predicated functions as a device enabling us to generalize rather than as an adjective or predicate describing the things he said, or the kinds of propositions that follow from true propositions. For example, its translation is to infer that: (∀p, q)(p & p ➝ q ➝ q)’ where there is no use of a notion of true statements. It is supposed in classical (two-valued) logic that each statement has one of these values, and not as both. A statement is then false if and only if it is not true. The basis of this scheme is that to each statement there corresponds a determinate truth condition, or way the world must be for it to be true, if this condition obtains the statement is true, and otherwise false. Statements may indeed be felicitous or infelicitous in other dimensions (polite, misleading, apposite, witty, etc.) but truth is the central normative notion governing assertion. Considerations of vagueness may introduce greys into this black-and-white schemes. For the issue of whether falsity is the only way of failing to be true. The view, if a language is provided with a truth definition, according to the semantic theory of th truth is a sufficiently characterization of its concept of truth, there is no further philosophical chapter to write about truth itself or truth as shared across different languages. The view is similar to that of the disquotational theory
There are technical problems in interpreting all uses of the notion of truth in such ways, but they are not generally felt to be insurmountable. The approach needs to explain away apparently substantive uses of the notion, such as . . . ‘science aims at the truth’ or ‘truth is a norm governing discourse. Indeed, postmodernist writing frequently advocates that we must abandon such norms, along with a discredited ‘objective’ concept ion of truth. But perhaps, we can have the norms even when objectivity is problematic, since they can be framed within mention of truth: Science wants to be so that whenever science holds that ‘p’, when ‘p’‘. Discourse is to be regulated by the principle that it is wrong to assert ‘p’: When not-p.
It is important to stress how redundancy or the deflationary theory of self-consciousness, and any theory of consciousness that accords a serious role in self-consciousness to mastery of the semantics of the first-person pronoun, is motivated by an important principle that ha governed much of the development of analytical philosophy. This is the principle that the philosophical analysis of thought can only proceed through the philosophical analysis of language:
Thoughts differ from all else that is aid to be among the contents of the mind in being wholly communicable: It is of the essence of thought that I can convey to you the very thought that I have, as opposed to being able to tell you merely something about what my thought is like. It is of the essence of thought not merely to be communicable, but to be communicable, without residue, by means of language. In order to understand thought, it is necessary, therefore, to understand the means by which thought is expressed. We communicate thought by means of language because we have an implicit understanding of the workings of language, that is, of the principles governing the use of language, it is these principles, which relate to what is open to view in the employment of language, unaided by any supposed contact between mind and the senses that they carry. In order to analyses thought, therefore, it is necessary to make explicitly those principles, regulating our use of language, which we already implicitly grasp. (Dummett, 1978)
So how can such thoughts be entertained by a thinker incapable of reflexively referring to himself as English speakers do with the first-person pronoun be plausibly ascribed thought with first-person contents? The thought that, despite all this, there are in fact first-person contents that do not presuppose mastery of the first-person pronoun is at the core of the functionalist theory of self-reference and first-person belief.
The best developed functionalist theory of self-reference has been deployed by Hugh Mellor (1988-1989). The basic phenomenon he is interested in explaining is what it is for a creature to have what he terms as subjective belief, which is to say, a belief whose content is naturally expressed by a sentence in the first-person singular and the present tense. Mellor starts from the functionalist premise that beliefs are causal functions from desires to actions. It is, of course, the emphasis on causal links between belief and action that make it plausible to think that belief might be independent of language and conscious belief, since “agency entails neither linguistic ability nor conscious belief. The idea that beliefs are causal functions from desires to actions can be deployed to explain the content of a give n belief through which the equation of truth conditions and utility conditions, where utility conditions are those in which the actions caused by the conjunction of that belief with a single desire result in the satisfaction of that desire. To expound forthwith, consider a creature ‘x’ who is hungry and has a desire for food at time ‘t’. That creature has a token belief b/(p) that conjoins with its desire for food to cause it to eat what is in front of it at that time. The utility condition of that belief is that there is food in front of it at that time. The utility condition of that belief is that there is food in from it of ‘x’ at that time. Moreover, for b/(p) to cause ‘x’ to eat what is in front of it at ‘t’, b/(p) must be a belief that ‘x’ has at ‘t’. Therefore, the utility/truth conditions of b/(p) is that whatever creature has this belief faces food when it is in fact facing food. And a belief with this content is, of course, the subjective belief whose natural linguistic expression would be “I am facing food now.” On the other hand, however, a belief that would naturally be expressed wit these words can be ascribed to a non-linguistic creature, because what makes it the belief that it is depending not on whether it can be linguistically expressed but on how it affects behaviour.
For in order to believe ‘p’, I need only be disposed to eat what I face if I feel hungry: A disposition which causal contiguity ensures that only my simultaneous hunger can provide, and only into making me eat, and only then. That’s what makes my belief refers to me and to when I have it. And that’s why I need have no idea who I am or what the time is, no concept of the self or of the present, no implicit or explicit grasp of any “sense” of “I” or “now,” to fix the reference of my subjective belies: Causal contiguity fixes them for me.
Causal contiguity, according to explanation may well be to why no internal representation of the self is required, even at what other philosophers has called the subpersonal level. Mellor believes that reference to distal objects can take place when in internal state serves as a causal surrogate for the distal object, and hence as an internal representation of that object. No such causal surrogate, and hence no such internal representation, is required in the case of subjective beliefs. The relevant casual components of subjective beliefs are the believer and the time.
The necessary contiguity of cause and effect is also the key to =the functionalist account of self-reference in conscious subjective belief. Mellor adopts a relational theory of consciousness, equating conscious beliefs with second-order beliefs to the effect that one is having a particular first-order subjective belief, it is, simply a fact about our cognitive constitution that these second-order beliefs are reliably, though of course fallibly, generated so that we tend to believe that we believe things that we do in fact believe.
The contiguity law in Leibniz, extends the principles that there are no discontinuous changes in nature”: “natura non facit saltum, nature makes no leaps.” Leibniz was able to use the principle to criticize the mechanical system of Descartes, which would imply such leaps in some circumstances, and to criticize contemporary atomism, which implied discontinuous changes of density at the edge of an atom. However, according to Hume the contiguity of evens is an important element in our interpretation of their conjunction for being causal.
Others attending to the functionalist point of view are it’s the advocate’s Putnam and Stellars, and its guiding principle is that we can define mental states by a triplet of relations: What typically cayuses them, what affects they have on other mental states and what affects they have on behaviour. The definition need not take the form of a simple analysis, but if we could write down the totality of axioms, or postulates, or platitudes that govern our theories about what things are apt to cause (for example) a belief state, what effects it would have on a variety of other mental states, and what effect it us likely to have on behaviour, then we would have done all that is needed to maske the state a proper theoretical notion. It would be implicitly defined by these theses. Functionalism is often compared with descriptions of a computer, since according to it mental descriptions correspond to a description of a machine in terms of software, that remains silent about the underlying hardware ee or “realization” of the program the machine is running. The principal advantages of functionalism include its fit with the way we know of mental states both of ourselves and others are via their effects on behaviour and other mental states. As with behaviourism, critics charge that structurally complex items that do not bear mental states might nevertheless imitate the functions that are cited. According to this criticism functionalism is too generous, and would count too many things as having minds. It is also queried whether functionalism is too parochial, able to see mental similarities only when there is causal similarity, when our actual practices of interpretation enable us to ascribe thoughts and desires to persons whose causal structure may be rather different from our own. It may then seem as though beliefs and desires can be variably realized in causal architectures, just as much as they can be in different neurophysiological stares.
Nevertheless, we are confronted with the range of putatively self-conscious cognitive states, one might assume that there is a single ability that is presupposed. This is my ability to think about myself, and I can only have knowledge about myself if I have beliefs about myself, and I can only have beliefs about myself if I can entertain thoughts about myself. The same can be said for autographical memories and moral self-understanding. These are ways of thinking about myself.
Of course, much of what I think when I think about myself in these self-conscious ways is also available to me to employ in my thoughts about other people and other objects. My knowledge that I am a human being deploys certain conceptual abilities that I can also deploy in thinking that you are a human being. The same holds when I congratulate myself for satisfying the exacting moral standards of autonomous moral agencies. This involves concepts and descriptions that can apply equally to themselves and to others. On the other hand, when I think about myself, I am also putting to work an ability that I cannot put to work in thinking about other people and other objects. This is precisely the ability to apply those concepts and descriptions to myself. It has become common to refer to this ability as the ability to entertain “I’-thoughts.
Nonetheless, both subject and object, either mind or matter, are real or both are unreal, imaginary. The assumption of just an illusory subject or illusory object leads to dead-ends and to absurdities. This would entail an extreme form of skepticism, wherein everything is relative or subjective and nothing could be known for sure. This is not only devastating for the human mind, but also most ludicrous.
Does this leave us with the only option, that both, subject and objects are alike real? That would again create a real dualism, which we realized, is only created in our mind. So, what part of this dualism is not real?
To answer this, we have first to inquire into the meaning of the term "real.” Reality comes from the Latin word "realitas,” which could be literally translated by "thing-hood.” "Res" does not only have the meaning of a material thing.” "Res" can have a lot of different meanings in Latin. Most of them have little to do with materiality, e.g., affairs, events, business, a coherent collection of any kind, situation, etc. These so-called simulative terms are always subjective, and therefore related to the way of thinking and feeling of human beings. Outside of the realm of human beings, reality has no meaning at all. Only in the context of conscious and rational beings does reality become something meaningful. Reality is the whole of the human affairs insofar as these are related to our world around us. Reality is never the bare physical world, without the human being. Reality is the totality of human experience and thought in relation to an objective world.
Now this is the next aspect we have to analyse. Is this objective world, which we encounter in our experience and thought, something that exists on its own or is it dependent on our subjectivity? That the subjective mode of our consciousness affects the perceptions of the objective world is conceded by most of the scientists. Nevertheless, they assume a real and objective world, that would even exist without a human being alive or observing it. One way to handle this problem is the Kantian solution of the "thing-in-itself," that is inaccessible to our mind because of mind's inherent limitations. This does not help us very much, but just posits some undefinable entity outside of our experience and understanding. Hegel, on the other side, denied the inaccessibility of the "thing-in-itself" and thought, that knowledge of the world as it is in itself is attainable, but only by "absolute knowing" the highest form of consciousness.
One of the most persuasive proofs of an independent objective world, is the following thesis by science: If we put a camera into a landscape, where no human beings are present, and when we leave this place and let the camera take some pictures automatically through a timer, and when we come back some days later to develop the pictures, we will find the same picture of the landscape as if we had taken the picture ourselves. Also, common-sense tells us: if we wake up in the morning, it is highly probable, even sure, that we find ourselves in the same environment, without changes, without things having left their places uncaused.
Is this empirical argument sufficient to persuade even the most sceptical thinker, which there is an objective world out there? Hardly. If a sceptic nonetheless tries to uphold the position of a solipsistic monism, then the above-mentioned argument would only be valid, if the objects out there were assumed to be subjective mental constructs. Not even Berkeley assumed such an extreme position. His immaterialism was based on the presumption, that the world around us is the object of God's mind, that means, that all the objects are ideas in a universal mind. This is more persuasive. We could even close the gap between the religious concept of "God" and the philosophical concept by relating both of them to the modern quantum physical concept of a vacuum. All have one thing in common: there must be an underlying reality, which contains and produces all the objects. This idea of an underlying reality is interestingly enough a continuous line of thought throughout the history of mankind. Almost every great philosopher or every great religion assumed some kind of supreme reality. I deal with this idea in my historical account of mind's development.
We're still stuck with the problem of subject and object. If we assume, that there may be an underlying reality, neither physical nor mental, neither object nor subject, but producing both aspects, we end up with the identity of subject and object. So long as there is only this universal "vacuum,” nothing is yet differentiated. Everything is one and the same. By a dialectical process of division or by random fluctuations of the vacuum, elementary forms are created, which develop into more complex forms and finally into living beings with both a mental and a physical aspect. The only question to answer is, how these two aspects were produced and developed. Maybe there are an infinite numbers of aspects, but only two are visible to us, such as Spinoza postulated it. Also, since the mind does not evolve out of matter, there must have been either a concomitant evolution of mind and matter or matter has evolved whereas mind has not. Consequently mind is valued somehow superiorly to matter. Since both are aspects of one reality, both are alike significant. Science conceives the whole physical world and the human beings to have evolved gradually from an original vacuum state of the universe (singularity). So, has mind just popped into the world at some time in the past, or has mind emerged from the complexity of matter? The latter are not sustainable, and this leaves us with the possibility, that the other aspect, mind, has different attributes and qualities. This could be proven empirically. We do not believe, that our personality is something material, that our emotions, our love and fear are of a physical nature. The qualia and properties of consciousness are completely different from the properties of matter as science has defined it. By the very nature and essence of each aspect, we can assume therefore a different dialectical movement. Whereas matter is by the very nature of its properties bound to evolve gradually and existing in a perpetual movement and change, mind, on the other hand, by the very nature of its own properties, is bound to a different evolution and existence. Mind as such has not evolved. The individualized form of mind in the human body, that is, the subject, can change, although in different ways than matter changes. Both aspects have their own sets of laws and patterns. Since mind is also non-local, it comprises all individual minds. Actually, there is only one consciousness, which is only artificially split into individual minds. That's because of the connection with brain-organs, which are the means of manifestation and expression for consciousness. Both aspects are interdependent and constitute the world and the beings as we know them.
Scientific knowledge is an extension of ordinary language into greater levels of abstraction and precision through reliance upon geometry and numerical relationships. We imagine that the seeds of the scientific imagination were
planted in ancient Greece. This, of course, opposes any other option but to speculate some displacement afar from the Chinese or Babylonian cultures. Partly because the social, political, and economic climates in Greece were more open in the pursuit of knowledge along with greater margins that reflect upon cultural accessibility. Another important factor was that the special character of Homeric religion allowed the Greeks to invent a conceptual framework that would prove useful in future scientific investigations. But it was only after this inheritance from Greek philosophy was wedded to some essential feature of Judeo-Christian beliefs about the origin of the cosmos that the paradigm for classical physics emerged.
The Greek philosophers we now recognized as the originator’s scientific thoughts were oraclically mystic who probably perceived their world as replete with spiritual agencies and forces. The Greek religious heritage made it possible for these thinkers to attempt to coordinate diverse physical events within a framework of immaterial and unifying ideas. The fundamental assumption that there is a pervasive, underlying substance out of which everything emerges and into which everything returns are attributed to Thales of Miletos. Thales had apparently transcended to this conclusion out of the belief that the world was full of gods, and his unifying substance, water, was similarly charged with spiritual presence. Religion in this instance served the interests of science because it allowed the Greek philosophers to view “essences” underlying and unifying physical reality as if they were “substances.”
Nonetheless, the belief that the mind of God as the Divine Architect permeates the workings of nature. All of which, is the principle of scientific thought, as pronounced through Johannes Kepler, and subsequently to most contemporaneous physicists, as the consigned probability can feel of some discomfort, that in reading Kepler’s original manuscripts. Physics and metaphysics, astronomy and astrology, geometry and theology commingle with an intensity that might offend those who practice science in the modern sense of that word. “Physical laws,” wrote Kepler, “lie within the power of understanding of the human mind, God wanted us to perceive them when he created us in His image so that we may take part in His own thoughts . . . Our knowledge of numbers and quantities are the same as that of God’s, at least as far as we can understand something of it in this mortal life.”
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