Paul OHara - The Limits of Knowledge

The Limits of
KNOWLEDGE

Paul OHara

Copyright 2010 by Paul OHara.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2010910353

ISBN: Hardcover 978-1-4535-3464-9

Softcover 978-1-4535-3463-2

Ebook 978-1-4535-0649-3

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Contents

Introduction

S ince the dawn of time, philosophers have found themselves divided over the question concerning the source of our knowledgeis this something that springs from our senses or is this something that springs from our minds? Plato painted the picture of a supersensible world aloof from the shadowy quagmire of our lives. Democritus, unlike Aristotle, believed that matter was composed of particles that he called atoms. For a whilst, and during the Middle Ages, it appeared that the Aristotelian approach had gained the upper hand. Scholars such as St Thomas Aquinas, Suarez and St Anselm rigorously debated the questions concerning accident and essence, body and soul and quality and quantity. Due to the influence of thinkers such as Descartes however and the monumental achievements of Newton, by the eighteenth century and well and truly by the nineteenth century, there was a definite change in the air. Today, and in the twenty-first century, our world is dominated by the scientific point of view. Design has become a dirty word, teleology has become a dirty word and Kants Critique of Teleological Judgement has become an idle curiosity. But the question still remainsin what sense is knowledge the product of our minds just as much as it is of our ability to organize and regulate the world in which we live?

We begin our journey in an Aristotelian spirit by reaffirming some of the stock concepts that have become part of our everyday vocabulary: the relation between matter and form, actuality and potentiality, unity and multiplicity, but of course, making them conformable to our present-day requirements. The first five chapters are especially important, since they lay the groundwork for a great deal that follows or at least inform many of the topics that are later taken up for discussion. At this point however, a word of warning may be in order. Some of the terms that appear in these early chapters are not, it is true, the sorts of things you are likely to find in contemporary literature (viz. specific and numerical identity, immanent and final causality). The point however is that they can be very useful in providing the context or the setting from which our enquiries proceed. Philosophy it must be remembered was not invented yesterday (even if linguistic analysis was) and we need, to some extent, to acknowledge the wisdom and achievements of those who have come before us.

Woven into this general fabric, there are discussions about more traditional problems, e.g. the problem of universals and something of more recent interest, the analytic-synthetic distinction. With respect to the latter, there are two issues we are concerned with: ( a ) whether this supports a kind of psychologism and ( b ) whether there is any genuine knowledge that could be described as synthetic a priori . So far as it concerns the first, a case could be made for saying that a judgement is not the same as a proposition, or at least that it is a mental construct, whereas a proposition is both a composite and what is real. With respect to the second, the question could be asked why there are not propositions both analytic and a posteriori , which tends to fuel our suspicion that this is not something genuine but rather spurious in its nature.

As a general observation, the logical content of this work could be said to be something that spans a wide divide, but there is no suggestion that what we are doing here is in any way precise or methodological. Certainly we deal at length with the basic laws of thought, but that it is only to indicate the kind of restraints that must be placed on the way we judge and deliberate. Our treatment of the law of identity is perhaps a little novelnot being of a monistic cast of mind, I have opted for something called the identity of coefficients to encapsulate the meaning of unity in the face of a world that is essentially quite diverse. For the most part however we tend to canvass the work of a wide variety of logicians without supporting any particular approach.

One of the chief characteristics that needs to be noted is the more dynamical approach that we taken to the question of space. In Homogeneity and Heterogeneity, it is important to note the way that space is conceived of is not as an addendum to matter, but rather as a substance in and of itself. I say substance, but what I really mean is something self-sustaining. This is reflected in the fact that we always treat space and matter as if what they embodied were reciprocal properties and, thus in a sense, were but one and the same. Of course it is true that space and matter are not coordinated in the same way as are space and time, but the intuitive idea is that they should at least be some latitude in the way we might treat of the former. Thus material parts are conjunctive with cavernous parts; the puncturing of space is conjunctive with the puncturing of matter; a proper whole as a scattered whole is conjunctive with a proper part as a solid part, etc. And although this may seem a little odd, it does enable us to develop certain concepts in a way that is consonant with our aims. The way we treat the meaning of a proper whole also has implications for the meaning of a part that is either exclusive or inclusive. Since the whole is not really an encompassing whole, there will be a double meaning for what is inclusive or exclusive in itself. That is, it will depend on whether we are talking about an inclusive or exclusive part of space (that is, the whole of space or a hole in space) or an inclusive or exclusive part of matter (that is, the whole as the sum of its parts). Where space is concerned, what we start with is something necessarily inclusive . Where matter is concerned, what we start with is something necessarily exclusive . This needs to be kept in mind in our treatment, for instance, of a compound judgement.

Another issue that we seek to address is the relation between organisms and mechanisms. Given that we are living in a post-Darwinian age, it behoves us to give a more credible account of the way the world was formed, in both a physical and an ecological sense. Since earliest times, philosophers have been somewhat remiss in this regard, preferring a set of assumptions to any active or constant engagement with the facts. Invariably this account begins with an act of God or some creative essence and then moves on to a description of man as the image or the embodiment of His Maker. This in turn leads on to a spurious kind of causality and the claim that in order to be vital something must also be the cause and effect of itself, hence both immanent and final causality. We have attempted to debunk this by suggesting that versatility concerns both the obsolescence of any part in relation to the durability of any whole and the obsolescence of any whole in relation to the durability of any part. And so in our chapter on personal identity, we have endeavoured to make clear that the identity of any person is not the same as the identity of any thing. It has often been said that the identity of any thing concerns its persistence throughout space and time and that if you can map the coordinates of an object as it moves from place to place, then undoubtedly you would consider it to be one and the same. But there is a problem about this so far as it concerns the identity of a person, since consciousness may sometimes take us in one direction and sometimes take us in another. So far as time is concerned, the impressions we form of ourselves are also the source of what we are, our memories remind us of who we were and what we have become. But this may be very different so far as it concerns the space that we occupy or, at least, the particles of matter that through their movement coalesce to form us as we are. A cripple who is confined to a wheelchair would hardly be aware of how the parts were vitally connected to any whole. Hence his consciousness of what he is in one respect could be very different from what it was in any other. He may indeed have an active and vivid memory, but we would not say he had an active and energetic life.