Epistemology

Criteriology or Criticism as epistemology is sometimes called is the study of our certain knowledge and of the grounds upon which its certitude rests. The criterion, from the Greek, to judge or distinguish, of truth is the test by which we distinguish between truth and error.

It is therefore a theory of certitude.

Is it logic? No. Logic, the first philosophy, is the correct method of reasoning. Epistemology is the study of rational affirmations of what information we have acquired.

Indeed, if we mention logic at all it is important to remember we cannot even speak of it unless by words of agreed meaning and set together in a construct of grammar. Grammar is an old Scottish word incidentally, which meant Glamour. Work that one out! It soon settled back into what great old Greek teachers like Dionysius Thrax of Alexandria (Egypt) planned it to be.

Although Plato and Aristotle considered and helped to found discussion concerning the parts of speech, Thrax raised it to a system which became a tremendous instrument of logic. It is not really a joke to say that Epistemology (critical judgement) begins with etymology. First know your words. Then use them reasonably. It does not matter if time changes a tone of meaning here or there or inserts new words for old meanings. The river of reason flows from idea to certainty and its water, like a meaningful string of words, retains its nature whatever its colour. So do not be tricked by the sophist schools of linguistics, flip-flop grammar and chalk sentences written on blackboards which the writer profers as its own tortured proposition. e.g. "This sentence is false!" No. The sentence there is just plain silly as is whoever wrote it. But the purpose is to discourage certainty. This in turn discourages confidence in the intellect to accurately discern what is true and what false.

Only intellects may propose. A sentence may reflect reality or not but what it reflects is no more or less than what its writer has decided to write. Its business is to encompass and describe the writer's proposition and contain a judgment. Logic begins here in common grammar and requires all that classical philosphy inheres when addressing the intellect's certain capacity to describe and comprehend the images raised in it by the senses which have perceived a real object existing independently of it.

The sentence is then the product of that conceptual/comprehending action, that action which is at the end a judgment. The sentence sees nothing, feels nothing, perceives and judges of nothing.

Why do I make much of such a silly thing? Why because it is presented as a commonplace in any number of university philosophy lessons. Not to be treated as we do here but presented to a class as a cunning problem for intellectuals. But it serves to witness to an urgent need for Aristotle and Thomas.

So, as I say, before proceeding lets look at Epistemology - in which the following lapidary elements of certainty are erected:

• A) Error itself presupposes truth.
• B) A false thought, false in all its constituents, is impossible - for, being in conformity to nothing whatsoever, it would be empty of thought - having zero meaning.
• C) If a man doubted the veracity of his organs of knowledge he 'could not live'. Since every action or abstraction from action is an act of trust in that veracity, action and inaction would alike become impossible. He would lose his reason.

Why? Well simply because every demonstration rests upon some previously admitted certainty - and it is their absolute intention to deny any such foundation.

However, to defend human knowledge it is enough for us to:-

• 1) Show what knowledge consists of and how its is obtained;
• 2) Refute the arguments they adduce;
• 3) Reduce such specious propositions to absurdity - reductio ad absurdum.

Remember Aristotle's elegant little dilemma when we began together: "You say you must philosophise; then you must philosophise. You say you must not philosophise; then you must philosophise".

The sole philosophy open to those who doubt the possibility of truth is absolute silence - even mental <g>.

Aristotle had already seen them off thus:

"Such men must make themselves vegetables."

So here is a conclusion which you can find in your Maritain textbooks:

The truth of knowledge consists in the conformity of the mind with what it observes. It is absurd to doubt the reliability of our organs of knowledge.

We cannot look at the weird and wonderful schools of scepticism and irrational rationalism right now (we have mentioned them in other lectures, people like Descartes, Kant, Hume, Rousseau etc. and no doubt others will introduce you to the older mob; folk from Pyrrho to Sextus Empiricus) for we must push on to another consideration of our power to judge critically.

So lets use a fancy phrase from philosophy right away - formal object, that to which intellectual knowledge relates to in itself.

When the intellect functions there is an object always present to the mind. That object is Being. That is, whatever I know by my intellect, there is always some being or mode of being present to my mind. There is however nothing else except Being which is always present in this way.

If I conceive of a quality or a number or size (magnitude) or a substance, whatever of these, I am aware of what is common to all - some being or mode of being. But the only thing common to all IS being. Thus we say that Being (Ens) is the formal object of the intellect.

As Maritain says: "Being is the formal object of the intellect, that is to say, the object which it apprehends primarily and in itself (per se primo) and in function of which it apprehends everything else."

To use the understanding without the notion of being arising is an impossibility.

Moreover, the intellect is able to apprehend the Being of bodies in their sensible appearances (phenomena). Look back to the impasse which we raised with C. S. Lewis last week when he spoke of teachers refusing to accept that the mind could judge the value of phenomena presented by a lovely waterfall!

Consider also, physiology studies the properties of living organisms to causes and those causes themselves belong to the sensible (concrete) order.

So the sciences of secondary causes (matter needing other matter to move or change it) are the sciences of phenomena.

We will skip past the considerations of philosophy being divided into natural philosophy and metaphysics but please do note the division. I noticed some of our younger philosophers seemed to have moved the subject into the realms of a Faerie Queene (Spencer's spelling). It is enough now to grasp that the first covers the study of the Being of bodies apprehended in their first principles and the second, the study of Being simply as Being.

Actually the distinctive function of criticism or epistemology (or criteriology) is to make clear that the being with which we are concerned is indeed the Actual being of things, which exists in them independently of the knowing mind.

They exist whether or not a man exists to think about them.

Now this again takes us back to the Waterfall and trees a host of modernists errors, whether determinist, subjectivist, solipsist or plain old sceptic.

To maintain that the object of our intellect is not the true being of things but only the idea of being - only our ideas - is to maintain that we are all sceptics. For if this WERE true, it would be impossible for our minds under any circumstances to conform to that which really is - and truth would indeed be unattainable.

The intellect would stand convicted of falsehood, as Maritain put it, for what the intellect professes to know is what things ARE - not what its ideas are.

This rumbling bother about what comes first, ideas or awareness of exterior being in what the mind apprehends is now a main arena in major philosophical debates (those of any substance). One excellent thinker is Mortimer J Adler whose book, Ten Philosophical Mistakes, addresses this particular problem. We will refer to it next term.

In truth, ideas, as the consciousness in us agrees immediately, are our INSTRUMENTS of knowledge. If knowledge did not grasp things exterior to the mind as they are in themselves, knowing would be an operation or activity that could not reach an end or object, which is absurd. Think about this. To form an idea is "to know", just as to use an axe is to chop or cut. And it is impossible to cut without cutting something (the end and object of the act is here cutting - not the axe but what it cuts) so it is impossible to know without knowing something - the end or object of knowing, which is not the idea but something known by it.

We may then say as a conclusion that the formal object of the intellect is Being. What it apprehends of its very nature is what things ARE independently of us.

We say too, that the intellect is a truthful faculty and Being is the necessary and immediate object of the intellect.

By being intelligible we mean knowable by the intellect. But to affirm that Being is the necessary and immediate object of the intellect, and that the intellect attains true knowledge, is to say that Being as such is an object of which the intellect possesses true knowledge. That is to say that Being is intelligible.

And to say that Being is intelligible is to say that intelligibility accompanies Being, so that everything is intelligible in exact proportion to its Being.

Here I interject to remind you that God is intelligible but not in proportion to human power. God KNOWS God. God is intelligible. Do you see that there is no theological quarrel with the intelligibility of Being.

So we conclude: Being is intelligible. Everything is intelligible in exact proportion to its Being.

Here are some notes:

Intellectual knowledge comes into existence 'by means of ideas'. But ideas are simply 'that by means of which'(id quo), not that which (id quid) we know directly. That's why we say the Being of things is the immediate object of our intellectual knowledge. Immediate means without the need for an intermediary term or an object previously known.

Now we may hazard an entry into Logic proper. What IS it?

Logic is the introduction to philosophy in the strictest sense.

We say that it studies the conceptual being (being as conceived intellectually and called ens rationis) which directs the mind to truth.

Logic studies reason as the tool of knowledge - the act which directs the very act of reason.

To hark back, ideas are the internal likenesses of things by which the latter are represented in such a way that we can reason about them and thus acquire knowledge.

Images are the internal likenesses of things by which those things are presented to us as our sensations have first made them known to us.

Words directly signify ideas and at the same time evoke images. Sciences, if you will, are systems of ideas.

Consider this; chemistry only studies, say chlorine, what is common to all the individual molecules of chlorine. This must be so since the individual as such explains nothing since it represents only itself and cannot account for anything else.. Empiricists never consider this philosophical fact about science.

We may say: Sensations and images present the "individual" to us (or singular).

Ideas present the universal.

Please note in passing that modern philosophies are deeply imbued with nominalism, a bald claim that to use terms like universal and abstract is to speak of what has no relation in reality. They also dislike terms like potential and act. Indeed if there were no other reason for the development of modern positivist philosophies this denial of things essential to intellectual freedom would be enough.

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