Telling It Slant: II
conversations with Being and Nothingness
David:
Hi - I found your dialogue on language and knowledge to be interesting, and as it turns out, stimulating. I'm writing today from the point of view of a man who has just finished his daily cup of instant orange cappuccino, on a leisurely Sunday morning, and whose favorite subject in school was epistemology and language. It's not that I did well in either, but I surely did enjoy the battle. // I apologize in advance, as I tend to be verbose and tend to wander around the subject. I'm thinking of a sort of thought experiment, wherein I read your conversation, and then react off the top of my head, without taking the time to think it through. I've had more than a quarter century to ponder the problem, following one semester of "knowledge, truth, and belief" or whatever it was called. I'm still struggling with it. I want to say that language is always inevitably symbolic representation of something "other".
Kat:
*Well language is certainly a socially-constructed symbol-system….
David:
Even when we are conversing about language itself, the words are always apart from the minds of those who ponder the words, held at arms length. We never achieve identity with the words, we never become the words. // When we talk about knowledge, we should assume from the start that our words can never be that to which the words refer. Our words will always be limited to symbolic representation.
Kat:
*Limited or de-limited to symbolic representation? Remember, Derrida was the one who spoke of the constant deferral of meaning in words, and Barthes of the innate symbolism a word/image possesses; meaning, when I say the word tree, we may not think of the same type of tree, but we do think of a thing with a trunk and leaves, branches and rooted in the ground, growing vertically.
David:
But does that limit our ability to know?
Kat:
*Know what? If you mean ‘does it limit our ability to possess knowledge?’, I would say it actually opens our minds further to possessing knowledge. The most important thing to realize, I think, is the concept presented in (John) Donne’s “Satires” – that man must awaken to the realization that there is always only the pursuit of knowledge, and no attainable-end goal, no end-all apex of knowledge, no universal truth; the future is always unknown, and so we are always still climbing the mountain of knowledge upwards into a dark sky. That’s a little poetic but you get the idea.
David:
One small "takeaway" from college days is a definition of knowledge: "justifiable true belief". We can believe that the sun will rise in the east tomorrow, and when it does indeed rise we can take that as justification for our belief. We can say that we know the sun will rise in the east tomorrow.
Kat:
*Ah, that must have been a philosophy class you took. A philosophy professor of mine gave that example of the sun, and then said, “Now a problem for you regarding time. A man asks another man what time it is. The second man replies, ‘It’s 5 o’clock on the sun.’”
I think the problem/questions you’re getting at are the problems of ‘confirmable and non-confirmable statements as truth. (Taking from AJ Ayer Language Truth and Logic and Nelson Goodman Fact Fiction and Forecast).
In linguistics, there’s the idea that a set of inferred sentences about the antecedent will include the negation of the consequent as a true statement. The formula used is A*SàC, where S includes –C as true. The problem with the two types of statements as truth investigates where sentences may fail to obtain a copula, a connection regardless of negation.
I think your sun example is an excellent example. In A*SàC, A=the antecedent or in this case, the fact that the sun has risen in the east every day before this. S=set of inferred sentences about A or in this case, S is the set of beliefs that the sun will rise in the east that has sustained over time. However, S also contains –C as true, where –C indicates the present condition of the unknown. If S = all our beliefs up to the present moment about the sun rising in the east, then it includes two things: one, we believe the sun will rise in the east, and also our uncertainty at the present moment that it will rise tomorrow in the east too. Thus, -C negates temporal boundaries by including elements of the future, of the unknown.
David:
The limits of knowledge are bound by the limits of our perception. Consider Descartes' discussion of solipsism, the point of which is that we must rely on our senses to gain knowledge about the universe, and we know that our senses can be fooled. The same point was made very nicely in The Matrix, where the whole conscious world turned out to be an induced deception of the cerebral cortex (or of the conscious mind, depending on how you view the mind-body problem). With that in mind, knowledge becomes a point on a relative scale, somewhere above "ill-considered opinion" and somewhere short of the divine knowledge of the engineer that created the whole thing. //
Kat:
*sounds like you’re a post-modernist. J Reading too much Samuel Beckett? I don’t know that I agree with solipsism but I do think we must rely on our senses to gain knowledge about the universe, rely on our experiences and their relations to attempt to understand bigger questions regarding our existence. I agree with you about where to place knowledge on a relational scale. I’m a true Horkheimer and Kant fan, but I always relate knowledge the way H— does, arguing true reason as rationality. On the flip side, is belief, the opposing force of rationality. One of my favorite things Kant wrote concerns the dialectic-investigation into truth of an opinion. In Critique of Pure Reason he wrote of the “natural and unavoidable dialectick of pure reason” which could also be called our beliefs, where our beliefs are that which we choose to believe in despite any evidence to its contrary, and which factors into our faculties of reason, causing certain errors.
So I agree; our senses are fooled when we give in to or choose to believe in the lies our wish images project in our minds, and when we let that govern our methods of reason, thus causing errors in our rationality.
David:
In conclusion, I am convinced that knowledge leads to peace. Words that lead to acts of cruelty, to war, are not informed by the light of knowledge. I'm thinking of the so-called "martyrs" in the news lately who end lives, believing they will live on in the afterlife, instantly joining the maker of the universe, to live happily ever after. From the viewpoint of the living, those martyrs cannot meet the test of "justified true belief". They cannot prove anything about an assumed afterlife. Passionately held beliefs may pass for knowledge, but they fall short on the relative scale -- often far short. The belief must be true and justifiable. //
Kat:
*but is it still not more a question that the belief must be confirmable rather than true and justifiable? Especially if we have moved from objective to subjective truth as H— proposes, then what can be proved as objectively true and justified?
David:
I suppose it matters because it goes to the motivation to fight. Why is anyone fighting that war? Truth is probably not an issue. The US seems to be motivated by one set of reasons, while those who oppose the US seem to be motivated by an unrelated set of reasons. But I digress. // I read a science fiction story long ago, can't recall who wrote it, that expressed the idea that the spread of violent races throughout the universe would be naturally limited by their inability to master the technologies necessary to traverse great distances, due to the violence in their minds. Knowledge leads to peace, and peace then leads to further knowledge. Only a truly peaceable race of creatures could master the ability to spread into the galaxy and beyond (or maybe we would figure out that we don't need to spread out.) As a race, as long as we are preoccupied with weaponry, our quest for knowledge will be self-limiting. We Earthlings should be devoting ourselves to healing: healing the natural environment, healing ourselves and each other. Those who are already doing so have glimpsed Truth.
Kat:
*Was that a book by CS Lewis? He has a very interesting triology about time travel, but I forget the titles. The mind is such an interesting thing. Is it enough to say that if everyone possessed truth and knowledge in their minds that we would be more peaceful? There seems to be a long history of the “resistant identity” within man, but how can we change that to a more peaceful “revolutionary identity?” I’m feeling lazy now, write me back, with your ideas, and I’ll think about this and write you more. J
2:19:29 PM 
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