Abstract
Epistemology is a perennial subject. Only when human knowledge ceases to grow can reflection on the nature of this knowledge come to an end. We must perpetually restate the problems of knowledge and constantly redefine the concept of knowledge in order to elucidate an everchanging knowledge-situation, and in order to draw conclusions from new departures in human knowledge. Changes in epistemology thus follow like a shadow (but not in any direct or functional way) changes in human knowledge. New and significant departures in human knowledge invariably cause a shift of the epistemological lenses. The development of semantics in the 20th century was an occasion for one of these shifts. The new epistemological vision resulting from this shift has been known as the ‘semantic’ concept of knowledge. This concept of knowledge attempts to establish the primacy of linguistics over epistemology, the primacy of the criteria of meaning over epistemological criteria; it claims that only by establishing clear criteria of meaning can we delineate the realm of significant knowledge.
I wish to express my gratitude to Professors Mario Bunge, Morris Engel, Imre Lakatos, Stephen Toulmin and J.O. Wisdom for reading the manuscript of this paper and for making many valuable suggestions.
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References
See Henryk Skolimowski, Polish Analytical Philosophy, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1967, Chapter VI.
No one perhaps showed this more clearly and forcefully than Imre Lakatos in his ‘Proofs and Refutations’, especially Part IV, The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 14, Nos. 53, 54, 55, 56 (1963–64); see also my Polish Analytical Philosophy, Chapter I.
One may of course deny, as some Oxford philosophers would, that the adherence to the codifier’s idiom commits us to naive realism. One may indeed deny this, but the fact is that the codifier’s position implies naive realism none the less.
William Gilbert, De Magnete, London 1600; English trans., New York 1958), p. L.
As late as the 1960s, Carnap insisted that “all that occurs objectively can be described in science; on the one hand the temporal sequence of events is described in physics; and, on the other hand, the peculiarities of man’s experiences with respect to time, including his different attitude towards past, present and future, can be described and (in principle) explained in psychology”. Clinching the matter in the style so characteristic of his early Vienna days, he said, “Since science in principle can say all that can be said, there is no unanswerable question left” (The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap, (The Library of Living Philosophers), ed. by P. Schilpp, Open Court Publishing Co., Chicago, III., 1965, pp. 37, 38).
In his intellectual autobiography in the above-mentioned volume, Carnap wrote: “I believed that the task of philosophy consists in reducing all knowledge to a basis of certainty. Since the most certain knowledge is that of the immediately given, whereas knowledge of material things is derivative and less certain, it seemed that the philosopher must employ a language which uses sense-data as a basis.” Then without any justification, Carnap immediately went on to say: “In the Vienna discussions my attitude changed gradually toward a preference for the physicalistic language” (The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap, p. 50).
My position here coincides with the position of K. Ajdukiewicz in his essay ‘Subiektywność i niepowtarzalność metody bezpośredniego doświadczenia’ [The Subjectivity and Unrepeatability of the Method of Immediate Experience], in Język i poznanie (PWN, Warszawa 1966 ), Vol. II.
Referring to the heyday of the Vienna Circle, Carnap said: “According to the original conception, the system of knowledge, although growing constantly more comprehensive, was regarded as a closed system in the following sense. We assumed that there was a certain rock bottom of knowledge, the knowledge of the immediately given, which was indubitable. Every other kind of knowledge was supposed to be firmly supported by this basis and therefore likewise decidable with certainty” (The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap, p. 57). Then referring to the early 1950s and his discussions with Einstein who challenged the notion of an “absolutely certain basis of knowledge”, Carnap in the same volume wrote: “I explained to Einstein that we had abandoned these earlier positivistic views, that we did no longer believe in a ‘rockbottom basis of knowledge’; and I mentioned Neurath’s simile that our task is to reconstruct the ship while it is floating on the ocean” (op. cit., p. 38). See also note 13 below.
W. V. Quine, Methods of Logic, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, 1961, p. X II.
Ibid., p. XII.
Ibid., p. XII.
W. V. Quine, ‘Mr. Strawson on Logical Theory’, Mind, October 1955, p. 434.
There is little doubt that the idea of the ‘rockbottom of knowledge’ was abandoned by logical positivists at least partly as the result of Popper’s forceful criticism launched in the early 1930’s, especially in Logik der Forschung.
Karl R. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations, Basic Books, London, 1962, especially Chapter I.
Karl R. Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Hutchinson, London, 1959, especially Chapter V.
And particularly not reducible to faith and passions as advocates of personal knowledge wish us to believe. One might ask in this context: if rationality is to be ‘justified’ and accounted for in terms of human passions and faith, how are these elements, in terms of which rationality is explained, to be justified themselves? One would probably be told that they are unanalyzable, that they indicate certain basic attitudes which explain other things but which require no further explication themselves. If so, the same is true of rationality; it is a distinctive way of viewing things, of grasping things, of discerning and separating them from other things.
W. W. Bartley III, for example, in his essay ‘Rationality Versus the Theory of Rationality’ in The Critical Approach to Science and Philosophy (ed. by Mario Bunge) argues that the crisis of integrity in the rationalist tradition is mainly due to a neglected crisis of identity. By improving the rationalist identity, Bartley wishes to improve the rationalist’s integrity. This new identity, according to Bartley, is “comprehensively critical rationalism” which stipulates that all beliefs of the rationalist, including his standards and his basic philosophical position, are left open to criticism. The focal point is on criticizibility of whatever view is entertained by the rationalist. Any position deemed rational must be open to criticism and consequently replaced by another position as the result of the criticism. Theoretically speaking, the rationalist may argue himself out of his own position.
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Skolimowski, H., Toulmin, S. (1969). Knowledge, Language, and Rationality. In: Cohen, R.S., Wartofsky, M.W. (eds) Proceedings of the Boston Colloquium for the Philosophy of Science 1966/1968. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 4. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-3378-7_5
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