[58] I am indebted to Dr. Bush's article on "Knowledge and
Perception," _Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific
Methods_, Vol. VI, p. 393, and to Professor Woodbridge's article on
"Perception and Epistemology" in the _James Memorial Volume_, as well
as to his paper on "Sensations," read at the 1910 meeting of the
American Philosophical Association. Since my point of departure and
aim are somewhat different, I make this general acknowledgment in lieu
of more specific references.
[59] Plato's use of shadows, of reflections in the water, and other
"images" or "imitations" to prove the presence in nature of non-being
was, considering the state of physical science in his day, a much more
sensible conclusion than the modern use of certain images as proof
that the object in perception is a psychical content. Hobbes expressly
treats all images as physical, as on the same plane as reflections in
the water and echoes; the comparison is his.
[60] It is impossible, in this brief treatment, to forestall every
misapprehension and objection. Yet to many the use of the term "seen"
will appear to be an admission that a case of knowledge is involved.
But is smelling a case of knowledge? Or (if the superstition persists
as to smell) is gnawing or poking a case of knowledge? My point, of
course, is that "seen" involves a relation to organic activity, not to
a knower, or mind.
[61] This is the phase of the matter, of course, which the
rationalistic or objective realist, the realist of the type of T. H.
Green, emphasizes. Put in terms of systems, the difficulty is that in
escaping the subjectivism latent in treating perception as a case of
knowledge, the realist runs into the waiting arms of the objective
idealist.
X
EPISTEMOLOGICAL REALISM: THE ALLEGED UBIQUITY OF THE KNOWLEDGE
RELATION
I have pointed out that if perception be treated as a case of
knowledge, knowledge of every form and kind must be treated as a case
of a presentation to a knower. The alleged discipline of epistemology
is then inevitable. In common usage, the term "knowledge" tends to be
employed eulogistically; its meaning approaches the connotation of the
term "science." More loosely, it is used, of course, to designate all
beliefs and propositions that are held with assurance, especially with
the implication that the assurance is reasonable, or grounded. In its
practical sense, it is used as the equivalent of "knowing _how_," of
skill or ability involving such acquaintance with things and persons
as enables one to anticipate how they behave under certain conditions
and to take steps accordingly. Such usages of the term are all
differential; they all involve definite contrasts--with ungrounded
conviction, or with doubt and mere guesswork, or with the inexpertness
that accompanies lack of familiarity. In its epistemological use, the
term "knowledge" has a blanket value which is absolutely unknown in
common life. It covers any and every "presentation" of any and every
thing to a knower, to an "awarer," if I may coin a word for the sake
of avoiding some of the pitfalls of the term "consciousness." And, I
repeat, this indiscriminate use of the term "knowledge," so foreign to
science and daily life, is absolutely unavoidable if perception be
regarded as, in itself, a mode of knowledge. And then--and only
then--the problem of "the possibility, nature, and extent of knowledge
_in general_" is also inevitable. I hope I shall not be regarded as
offensively pragmatic if I suggest that this undesirable consequence
is a good reason for not accepting the premise from which it follows,
unless that premise be absolutely forced upon us.
At all events, upon the supposition of the ubiquity of the knowledge
relation in respect to a self, presentative realism is compelled to
accept the genuineness of the epistemological problem, and thus to
convert itself into an epistemological realism, getting one more step
away from both naïve and naturalistic realism. The problem is
especially acute for a presentative realism because idealism has made
precisely this ubiquity of relationship its axiom, its short-cut. One
sample is as good as a thousand. Says Bain: "There is no possible
knowledge of a world except in relation to our minds. Knowledge means
a state of mind; the notion of material things is a mental fact. We
are incapable even of discussing the existence of an independent
material world; the very act is a contradiction. We can speak only of
a world presented to our own minds."
On the supposition of the ubiquity of the relation, realism and
idealism exhaust the alternatives; if the ubiquity of the relation is
a myth, both doctrines are unreal, because there is no problem of
which they are the solution. My first step in indicating the unreality
of both "solutions" is formal. I shall try to show that _if_ the
knowledge relation of things to a self is the exhaustive and inclusive
relation, there is no intelligible point at issue between idealism and
realism; the differences between them are either verbal or else due to
a failure on the part of one or the other to stick to their _common_
premise.
I
To my mind, Professor Perry rendered philosophic discussion a real
service when he coined the phrase "ego-centric predicament." The
phrase designated something which, whether or no it be real in itself,
is very real in current discussion, and designating it rendered it
more accessible to examination. In terming the alleged uniform
complicity of a knower a predicament, it is intended, I take it, to
suggest, among other things, that we have here a difficulty with which
all schools of thought alike must reckon, so that it is a difficulty
that cannot be used as an argument in behalf of one school and against
another. If the relation be ubiquitous, it affects alike every view,
every theory, every object experienced; it is no respecter of persons,
no respecter of doctrines. Since it cannot make any difference to any
particular object, to any particular logical assertion, or to any
particular theory, it does not support an idealistic as against a
realistic theory. Being a universal common denominator of all
theories, it cancels out of all of them alike. It leaves the issue one
of _subject-matter_, to be decided on the basis of that
subject-matter, not on the basis of an unescapable attendant
consideration that the subject-matter must be known in order to be
discussed. In short, the moral is quite literally, "Forget it," or
"Cut it out."
But the idealist may be imagined to reply somewhat as follows: "If the
ubiquity were of any kind other than precisely the kind it is, the
advice to disregard it as a mere attendant circumstance of discussion
would be relevant. Thus, for example, we disregard gravitation when we
are considering a particular chemical reaction; there is no ground for
supposing that it affects a reaction in any way that modifies it as a
chemical reaction. And if the 'ego-centric' relation were cited when
the point at issue is something about one group of facts in
distinction from another group, it ought certainly to be canceled from
any statement about them. But since the point at issue is precisely
the most universally defining trait of existence as known, the
invitation deliberately to disregard the most universal trait is
nothing more or less than an invitation to philosophic suicide."
If the idealist I have imagined as making the foregoing retort were up
in recent realistic literature, he might add the following argument
_ad hominem_: "You, my realistic opponent, say that the doctrine of
the external relation of terms expresses a ubiquitous mark of every
genuine proposition or relational complex, and that this ubiquity is a
strong presumption in favor of realism. Why so uneven, so partial, in
your attitude toward ubiquitous relations? Is it perchance that you
were so uneasy at our possession of a ubiquitous relation that gives a
short cut to idealism that you felt you must also have a short cut to
realism?"
If I terminate the controversy at this point, it is not because I
think the realist is unable to "come back." On the contrary, I stop
here because I believe (for reasons that will come out shortly) that
both realist and idealist, having the same primary assumption, can
come back at each other indefinitely. Consequently, I wish to employ
the existence of this _tu quoque_ controversy to raise the question:
Under what conditions is the relation of knower to known an
intelligible question? And I wish to show that it is _not_
intelligible, if the knowledge relation be ubiquitous and homogeneous.
The controversy back and forth is in fact a warning of each side by
the other not to depart from their _common_ premise. If the idealist
begins to argue (as he constantly does) as if the relation to "mind"
or to "consciousness" made some difference of a specific sort, like
that between error and fact, or between sound perception and
hallucination, he may be reminded that, since this relation is
uniform, it substantiates and nullifies all things alike. And the
realist is quite within the common premise when he points out that
every special fact must be admitted for what it is specifically known
to be; no idealistic doctrine can turn the edge of the fact that
knowledge has evolved historically out of a state in which there was
no mind, or of the fact that knowledge is even now dependent on the
brain, provided that specific evidence shows these to be facts. The
realist, on the other hand, must admit that, after all, the entire
body of known facts, or of science, including such facts as the above,
is held fast and tight in the net of relation to a mind or
consciousness. In specific cases this relation may be ignored, but the
exact ground for such an ignoring is precisely that the relation is
not a specific fact, but a uniform relation of facts. And to call it
an external relation makes no practical difference if it is universal
and uniform. So the idealist might reply.
Imagine a situation like the following: The sole relation an organism
bears to things is that of eater; the sole relation the environment
bears to the organism is that of food, that is, things-to-eat. This
relation, then, is exhaustive. It defines, or identifies, each term in
relation to the other. But this means that there are not, as respects
organism and environment, two terms at all. Eater-of-food and
food-being-eaten are two names for one and the same situation. Could
there be imagined a greater absurdity than to set to work to discuss
the relation _of_ eater _to_ food, _of_ organism _to_ the environment,
or to argue as to whether one modifies the other or not? Given the
premise, the statements in such a discussion could have only a verbal
difference from one another.
Suppose, however, the discussion has somehow got under way. Sides have
been taken; the philosophical world is divided into two great camps,
"foodists" and "eaterists." The eaterists (idealists) contend that no
object exists except in relation to eating; hence that everything is
constituted a thing by its relation to eating. Special sciences exist
indeed which discuss the nature of various sorts of things in relation
to _one another_, and hence in legitimate abstraction from the fact
that they are all foods. But the discussion of their nature _an sich_
depends upon "eatology," which deals primarily with the problem of the
possibility, nature, and extent (or limits) of eating food in general,
and thereby determines what food in general, _überhaupt_, is and
means.
Nay, replies the foodist (realist). Since the eating relation is
uniform, it is negligible. All propositions which have any
intelligible meaning are about objects just as they are, and in the
relations they bear to one another. Foods pass in and out of the
relation to eater with no change in their own traits. Moreover, the
position of the eaterists is self-contradictory. How can a thing be
eaten unless it is, in and of itself, a food? To suppose that a food
is constituted by eating is to presuppose that eating eats eating, and
so on in infinite regress. In short, to be an eater is to be an eater
of food; take away the independent existence of foods, and you deny
the existence and the possibility of an eater.
I respectfully submit that there is no terminus to such a discussion.
For either both sides are saying the same thing in different words, or
else both of them depart from their common premise, and unwittingly
smuggle in some relations between the organism and environment other
than that of food-eater. If to be an eater means that an organism
which is more and other than an eater is doing something
_distinctive_, because contrasting with its other functions, in eating
then, and then only, is there an issue. In this latter case, the thing
which is food may, of course, be _proved_ to be something besides
food, because of some different relation to the organism than that of
eating. But if both stick consistently to their common premise, we get
the following trivial situation. The idealist says: "Every philosophy
purports to be knowledge, knowledge of objects; all knowledge implies
relation to mind; therefore every object with which philosophy deals
is object-in-relation-to-mind." The realist says: "To be a mind is to
be a knower; to be a knower is to be a knower-of-objects. Without the
objects to be known, mind, the knower, is and means nothing."
The difficulties attending the discussion of epistemology are in no
way attendant upon the special subject-matter of "epistemology." They
are found wherever any reciprocal relation is taken to define,
exclusively and exhaustively, all the connections between any pair of
things. If there are two things that stand solely as buyer and seller
to each other, or as husband and wife, then that relation is "unique,"
and undefinable; to discuss the relation _of_ the relation _to_ the
terms of which it is the relation, is an obvious absurdity; to assert
that the relation does _not_ modify the "seller," the "wife," or the
"object known," is to discuss the relation _of_ the relation just as
much as to assert the opposite. The only reason, I think, why anyone
has ever supposed the case of knower-known to differ from any case of
an alleged exhaustive and exclusive correlation is that while the
knower is only one--just knower--the objects known are obviously many,
and sustain many relations to one another which vary independently of
their relation to the knower. This is the undoubted fact at the bottom
of epistemological realism. But the idealist is entitled to reply that
the objects in their variable relations to one another nevertheless
fall within a relation to a knower, _as long as_ that relation is
regarded by both as exhaustive or ubiquitous.