Abstract
An excursion into the theory of knowledge may seem quite out of place within a treatment of the cosmological argument. But I am convinced that this is not so, for reasons which will appear in what follows, and may be briefly summarised immediately. According to one conception of knowledge, what is primarily constitutive of it is experience; according to another, it consists of true belief backed up by reasons. (The two conceptions are set out by Plato in the Theaetetus, and are apparently both rejected by him.)1 From the former conception of the nature of knowledge, the impossibility of knowing that God exists almost immediately follows; since God is not generally supposed to be an actual or conceivable object of ‘experience’ in any of the common senses of the term. From the latter conception, it by no means so obviously follows; and indeed this conception is very suggestive of ways in which claims to knowledge of God’s existence, particularly those depending to a greater or lesser extent on cosmological arguments, might be validated. It is therefore relevant to our main topic to consider which, if either, of these two conceptions of the nature and the scope of human knowledge is liable to be correct.
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Notes
For examples of the reasoning involved in this kind of case, see M. P. Crosland (ed.), The Science of Matter (Harmonds worth, 1971) 387–97.
A. J. Ayer seems at one time to have come close to this view; see Language, Truth and Logic (London, 1958) 101–2.
For this terminology, see B. J. F. Lonergan, Method in Theology (London, 1971) 20ff. A thorough account of the nature of these operations, and their bearing on philosophy and the sciences, is to be had in the same author’s Insight. A Study of Human Understanding (London, 1957).
L. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London, 1961) 1.
Cf. Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy (New York, 1960); especially the First and Sixth Meditations.
Cf. P. L. Berger and T. Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality (Harmondsworth, 1971) 13ff.
P. F. Strawson, The Bounds of Sense (London, 1966) 250.
For a useful discussion of the various meanings of ‘induction’, see R. Swinburne’s ‘Introduction’ to The Justification of Induction, ed. Swinburne (London and Oxford, 1974).
David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (London and Glasgow, 1962) book i, part iii, section xii; An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (London, 1902) section iv, part ii.
Cf. A. J. Ayer, The Concept of a Person (London, 1963) 87–90, 104–11.
I do not think there is any contradiction of substance between the positive account of the role of induction in coming to know given here and Sir Karl Popper’s well-known attack on induction (cf. K. R. Popper, Objective Knowledge (London, 1972) 85–103, 145–6, etc.;
Bryan Magee, Popper (London and Glasgow, 1973) ch. 2). It may amount to much the same thing to say that types of reasoning often known as ‘inductive’ are to be justified in a way different to what is often supposed, and to attack ‘induction’.
The Collected Papers of C. S. Peirce, ed. C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss (Cambridge, Mass., 1931–58) 5.189;
J. J. Shepherd, Experience, Inference and God (London, 1975) 146.
Hume, Enquiry, section viii. According to an understanding of causation very common among philosophers, ‘C is a cause of E if and only if C and E are actual and C is ceteris paribussufficient for E’ (E. Sosa, Causation and Conditionals (Oxford, 1975) 1; Sosa cites J. S. Mill, R. B. Braithwaite, C. G. Hempel and K. Popper). Now that the existence or occurrence of C is ceteris paribus sufficient for the existence or occurrence of E may seem to entail that, if C exists or occurs, E ceteris paribus cannot butexist or occur. So at this rate it looks as though one must either accept universal determinism or deny the principle of sufficient reason. However, I believe this to be a mistake. There is an equivocation which underlies the supposed dilemma, as has been pointed out by Professor G. E. M. Anscombe. The way of understanding ‘sufficient condition’ which I have just sketched is in fact not the only way. ‘The phrase … cozens the understanding into not noticing an assumption. For “sufficient condition” sounds like, “enough” And one certainly can ask: “May there not be enough to have made something happen — and yet it not have happened?”’ (G. E. M. Anscombe, Causality and Determination; Sosa, Causation and Conditionals, 66). If I am right, the principle of sufficient reason does entail that, if any thing or state of affairs exists or occurs, there must have been enough to make it exist or occur; but not that it then could not but have existed or occurred. To use the jargon which I have introduced, it entails that everything must have enabling conditions, not that everything must be subject to causal necessitation. And in fact explanations of the former kind, as I bring out in the text, are accepted as adequate both in ordinary affairs and in science.
Cf. Lonergan, Method in Theology, 16–17. For an illustration of the same point, see N. Chomsky, ‘A Review of Skinner’s Verbal Behaviour’, in The Structure of Language, ed. J. A. Fodor and J. J. Katz (New Jersey, 1964) 556.
Cf. H. Meynell, ‘On the Limits of the Sociology of Knowledge’, Social Studies of Science (1977) 495–6.
See G. Grisez, Beyond the New Theism (Notre Dame, 1975) 44.
See K. T. Fann, Wittgenstein’s Conception of Philosophy (Oxford, 1969) 54. I have to thank Philip Hoy for this reference.
Magee, Popper, 47–8; Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (London, 1972) 278.
See Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 169–70; P. K. Feyerabend, ‘Consolations for the Specialist’, in I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave (eds), Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge(Cambridge, 1970) 209.
Cf. H. Meynell, ‘Feyerabend’s Method’, Philosophical Quarterly (1978) 245.
Cf. A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic (London, 1958) 63–4, 123.
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding(London, 1947) book ii, ch. viii.
The qualification in brackets would leave room for those modern Lockeans who would acknowledge the tentative and provisional nature of actual scientific explanations. It is sometimes said that while science more or less demands that there be a distinction with regard to physical objects between their ‘primary qualities’ (what they actually have) and their ‘secondary qualities’ (what they merely seem to us to have due to the constitution of our sense-organs), philosophy is apt to show that such a distinction is untenable (cf. J. L. Mackie, Problems from Locke (Oxford, 1976) 7). It may easily be seen that the philosophical account presented here leads to no such conflict with science. By asking questions about things as presented to our senses, and known consequently in terms of their secondary qualities, we come to know of them as related to one another within an explanatory scheme, and as possessing qualities accordingly, which, while they do not directly correspond with what is available to our sense-experience, are verifiable by appeal to it. The more reliable such a scheme becomes in anticipating observations and successfully directing practice, the more it approximates to describing things as they really are and would have been apart from human knowledge and sensation — in other words, to describing things in terms of their ‘primary qualities’.
While the last sentence of the paragraph of course expresses Kant’s view rather than Berkeley’s, the rest of the paragraph represents more exactly the views of Berkeley. ‘If … we consider the difference there is betwixt natural philosophers (i.e. scientists) and other men, with regard to their knowledge of the phenomena, we shall find it consists, not in an exacter knowledge of the efficient cause that produces them …, but only in a greater largeness of comprehension’, and envisagement of ‘general rules’ which ‘extend our prospect beyond what is present, and near to us, and enable us to make very probable conjectures, touching things that may have happened at very great distances of time and place, as well as to predict things to come’ (G. Berkeley, Principles of Human Knowledge, cv; in A New Theory of Vision and Other Writings, ed. A. D. Lindsay (London, 1910) 165–6). W. V. O. Quine takes the point in effect, but jibs at its implications; cf. From a Logical Point of View (1963) p. 44: ‘As an empiricist, I … think of the conceptual scheme of science as a tool, ultimately, for predicting future experience in the light of past experience. Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries-not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable, epis– temologically, with the gods of Homer. For my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homer’s gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conception only as cultural posits. The myth of physical objects is epistemologically superior to most in that it has proved more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a manageable structure into experience.’ (I have to thank W. A. Mathews for drawing my attention to this passage.) Either Quine has good reason to prefer the conceptual scheme of science, as representative of the truth about things, to the Greek gods, or he has not. If he has, he is implicitly committed to what I have called the fully critical theory of knowledge. He has not, if he is consistent in his empiricism.
Cf. David Bloor, Knowledge and Social Imagery (London, 1976) 36–8.
For a remarkable instance of the making of this point, together with a shrugging-off of the implications of so doing, cf. R. Bierstedt’s ‘Introduction’ to Judith Wilier, The Social Deter– mination of Knowledge (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1971).
M. K. Munitz, The Mystery of Existence (New York, 1965) 57–8, 61–2, 67–8.
Ibid., 241–3, 247. For a concise presentation of the view of metaphysics just described, cf. F. Waismann, ‘How I See Philosophy’, Contemporary British Philosophy, 3rd series, ed. H. D. Lewis (London 1956) 489–90.
Among such ‘metaphysical’ world-views I would include those whose proponents would prefer to label them as ‘dialectical’. Cf. L. Bazhenov, ‘Matter and Motion’, in F.J. Adel mann (ed.), Philosophical Investigations in the USSR (Chestnut Hill and the Hague, 1975) 2–3.
Hume, Treatise, book i, part iii, sections ii–iv, xiii, xiv; Enquiry, section vii. Aristotle, Posterior Analytics(Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, 1960) ii, 1.
Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, i–viii (in Hume Selections, ed. Charles W. Hendel, Jr. (New York, 1955).
Cf. R. E. Hobart, ‘Hume without Scepticism’, Mind(July and October 1930).
In the Posterior Analytics (ii, 1), Aristotle distinguishes four types of question; and then reduces these to two by pairing off the first and third, the second and fourth. Cf. B. J. F. Lonergan, Ver- bum. Word and Idea in Aquinas (London, 1968) 12–13.
See S. Körner, Kant (Harmondsworth, 1955) 28, 117–18.
For defences of scepticism in recent philosophical writing, see P. Unger, ‘I Do Not Exist’, Perception and Identity, ed. G. F. Macdonald (London, 1979);
J. Kekes, ‘The Case for Scepticism’, Philosophical Quarterly (January 1975).
Wittgenstein maintained that knowledge of anything implied the possibility of doubt (Philosophical Investigations (Oxford, 1958) ii, xi; 221–2).
For a recent and very skilful defence of the view that knowledge is without foundations, see M. Williams, Groundless Belief (Oxford, 1977).
For useful discussions of these issues, see G. J. Warnock (ed.), The Philosophy of Perception (London, 1967).
Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford, 1958) ii, xi, 221–2.
David B. Burrell, Aquinas. God and Action (London, 1979) 4.
See R. Bambrough, ‘How to Read Wittgenstein’ in G. N. A. Vesey(ed.), Understanding Wittgenstein, (London, 1974) 130–1.
J. Monod, Chance and Necessity (London, 1972) 154.
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Meynell, H.A. (1982). On Knowledge and Experience. In: The Intelligible Universe. New Studies in the Philosophy of Religion. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-05195-3_3
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