Merleau-Ponty and Incarnation

We are embodied. This is not a generally contentious claim, but its implications are not well thought out. In this post, I want to sketch an argument for using Merleau-Ponty to fill in this claim and its impact on ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty is famous for returning the body to philosophy, particularly in the existentialist tradition. His arguments push against scientific reductionism without holding the mental to be independent of the physical. This emphasis on our intimate connection to our bodies as lived allows us to use him to think through how our embodiment has and provides value.

Merleau-Ponty views the body as the center-point from which we live and discover the world. It is the condition of our awareness of the world. On the other hand, the body as center-point is dependent on the world--it must be an opening on a world, or it is nothing. The body and the world are thus correlates. We therefore must discover them together.

This is an important point: once we have accepted our embodiment, we must accept that our awareness of ourselves as active and perceptual beings (more accurately: active-perceptual beings, as there is little distinction) depends on our awareness of the world. We discover both ourselves and the world through engaging the opening onto the world which we are with the world which we open out onto.

In this active-perceptual engagement the world and our bodies arise for us as significant--having significance. The world offers us options in relation to the body, which offers us correlated capacities. The options the world offers others are options we know through intersubjectivity--our awareness of others--which, Merleau-Ponty argues, occurs through our bodies. We subtly use our own bodies to understand the activities of others.

This centrality of the body and its capacities for knowledge of the world and others entails that differences in embodiment result in different ways of understanding the world. Furthermore, the body as condition of action presents itself as a Good without which we could do and know nothing. The body constrains our way of being toward the world, and thus, while Merleau-Ponty agrees with other existentialists that we have the ability to construct our identities, and that what we do produces us, he nevertheless leaves the initial substrate outside our ability to choose. The restraints of nature, and particularly body and the culture we are born into, provide a basis on which to stand when choosing. These restraints do not inhibit agency but rather enable it. This at the very least puts the question of the validity of sex change operations into question: is it a way of developing the bodies we are, or a way of bucking the very condition of our freedom? The same kind of question may be asked of other transhumanist technologies, whether reproductive or otherwise.

The biggest metaphysical commitment I see in Merleau-Ponty is to the value-ladenness of things prior to our choices. Perception is, for Merleau-Ponty, the activity of answering a question from the world. The world offers us puzzles which demand solutions, and those solutions must form the world into a comprehensible form. The solution is demanded by the world, and includes the values of the things seen, its potentialities for reception of activities of various sorts. There are occasionally multiple viable solutions, yet not just any solution will do: it must guide our interactions with the problem of the world productively. The solution must, as it were, harmonize the world's witness. This means that form is necessary to the world's existence--it must be viewed as formed--yet form is a perceptual category, and so the world must be viewed as given perceptually, not as though the real world were a world of imperceptibles.

Once we have attuned ourselves to this notion of form, of self-sustaining orderings, we can begin to recognize much of our work as the work of producing form. This is the aim of every valid institution: to be formed in a way which harmonizes and preserves its parts in order to exhibit its form by seeking some telos. Likewise, we can see the environment and our bodies both as forms whose structure is self-sustaining and not to be violated without good reason. We will have to recognize the fact that we deal in these and many other cases with systems which are complex and which seek their own continuance until they cannot, and which then tend to decline rapidly.

Hopefully this post has shown how Merleau-Ponty may be useful to Christian thought on how to think about ethics in light of our embodiment, which we must insofar as we think of ethics in light of Christ's incarnation. There will, of course, be much to think through about what Merleau-Ponty gets wrong in virtue of denying the existence of a sovereign God, but there remains much which is profitable for our thought, and even where he goes wrong, he will offer a sympathetic interlocutor on many points.

Truth

A Christian account of truth should be able to do three things, at a minimum.

1. Show how statements can be true or false.
2. Show how God can be the truth.
3. Show how truth can be something one walks in.

Now, it is possible that these three involve different sorts of truth, the term "truth" used in three different ways. Even so, a Christian account should show how the uses are connected and that the extension of the term makes sense.

If we start with the everyday notion of truth as correspondence with reality, we can make some vague headway. We will need to articulate what correspondence consists in, but we can make sense of how we can walk in correspondence with reality, and how God can be the ultimate reality and thus in fundamental correspondence with it. With this talk of correspondence uniting our success at achieving our the three criteria, we now must show what this correspondence consists in in each case, and how the kinds of correspondence are at least similar.

The standard talk about correspondence as a theory of truth applied to statements tends to be quite unclear. It says that a statement is true if and only if what it says actually is. But this does not get us any further: it is still unclear what has to be if what it says is to be.We have other resources, however: recall that I have already argued that knowledge that something is the case can be understood in terms of the capacities which one possesses if one possesses that knowledge. Thus, the truth conditions of a statement should be able to be cashed out in terms of capacities in some manner. We may better expand this to dispositions in the case of beliefs, although true beliefs produce dispositions which are also capacities.

How shall we articulate this truth in terms of dispositions? There are two properties which the dispositions must possess: they must be are fruitful and they must be stable. Fruitfulness means that the dispositions have benefit: you can get something from them. Stability requires that the dispositions stick. It means that having further experiences does not remove the disposition. To articulate truth in these terms, however, we should take the long view: fruitfulness and stability over the course of eternity is what matters, short-run fruitfulness and stability are only hints of the long-run fruitfulness and stability.

With an account of the truth of statements in place, the account of walking in the truth is relatively easy. To walk in the truth is simply to act in such a way that one is exercising those dispositions and capacities which knowing the truth produces. We can also articulate it as walking in correspondence with reality, since this is what knowing truth claims enables one to do. Knowing the truth enables walking in the truth.

In the case of God being the Truth, correspondence is not much at issue. Rather, the fact that God is who must be known if we are to live rightly, if we are live fruitful and stable lives in accord with how things are, is made clear. It is only in knowing God's power and mercy, his foresight and provision, his deep knowledge of us and his deep love for us, that we can live well. To live without this personal knowledge is to be doomed to live without good dispositions and without the capacity to--at least reliably and for the right reason--do what is right.

No, We Are Not Postmodern

The notion that we live in a postmodern world is bandied about, still. Primarily, I come across it among conservatives, political and theological, who tend to mean something about our culture not caring about truth or believing that truth is relative.

Perhaps there are some circles where the concept of postmodernism is applicable. Perhaps it is even clear what postmodernism is. I doubt it holds of American culture broadly. If it does hold, it holds more among conservatives themselves than liberals.

First of all, my argument is not that we actually tend to attain truth, nor that we actually act like we care about truth, but that we would claim to care about truth and claim to aim at it. Further, there are some postmodernist claims which we completely disavow. Yet there is continuity with postmodernism. We used to be more postmodern, but things have changed. It was a phase of which we retain a residue.

The very use of the terms "Post-Truth" and "Fake News" expose, not a lack of concern with truth, but a massive concern with truth, a weaponized concern with truth. Truth cannot be relative in the stereotypical postmodern sense without making these terms incoherent. These terms do not claim that the other side's news is true for them but not for the speaker, rather, it claims that the other side's news is false and usually suggests that the news is maliciously false (whether by intending to be false or maliciously being unconcerned with whether or not it is true). What we do not do, however, is claim that this is good or right.

The use of the term "Fake News" is also incompatible with a radical postmodern take on interpretation which would hold that there are no facts, only infinitely questionable interpretations. We do not claim that the news we call fake is merely an interpretation which is equally possible if one approaches with particular presuppositions; rather, we claim that they are accounts of matters of fact which get things wrong. We object, not only to what we take to be false factual claims, but to what we take to be unjustified interpretations. The postmodern instinct, on the other hand, is suspicious of claims about facts, being extremely aware of how statistics can lie, likely to a fault.

The belief that there is a "right side of history" or that America or a particular ideology is destined for greatness collides head on with the postmodern suspicion of metanarratives. Metanarratives being just such claims about history having a purpose, an overarching structure which gives historical action meaning and our actions meaning in historical perspective.

This shift has come about gradually, and there is important continuity with postmodernism here. We are strongly aware of the sociology of knowledge, that is, how our social groups set up plausibility structures and provide claims as to what can count as knowledge. This underlies the concern with bubbles and echo chambers. We are also aware of a need to listen to and understand those who disagree with us, which at least points in the direction of needing to be aware of each others' presuppositions in order to understand and communicate with each other across ideological lines.

The shift we have undergone is one which moves us from an individualistic way of securing certainty and tolerance by blocking argument to a communal way of doing so. Instead of individually trying to hold off arguments by denying that truths of certain kinds can reasonably be argued for, we form cultures which deny the possibility of any sane argument for certain claims, and regard all arguments for such claims as insane in some form, often maliciously so. Instead of individually demanding tolerance for our views, we merely isolate ourselves to groups of people who do tolerate our views and keep at arms length those who do not tolerate our views.

This shift has occurred because we want our truth claims to be recognized--again, the sociology of knowledge ideas which postmodern theorists largely popularized. In order to gain recognition for our truths, we need groups which will recognize those truths as truths. But we have also retained the desire to avoid needing to argue carefully for our views in response to all-comers. We are uncomfortable with argument, perhaps largely because one of the things we have retained from the postmodern era is a suspicion of reason. The only way to gain recognition for truth claims and avoid argument (and thus gain something have the form of certainty but lacking its power) is to form echo chambers. The two desires of our era are, then, the recognition of our own truth claims and the avoidance of conflict. In some ways, the latter is an extreme manifestation of the former--conflict occurs where truth claims are not recognized. To sum it up in a single desire: we desire certainty. This, too, is opposed to what "postmodernism" is ordinarily used to mean. A true postmodernism is comfortable with uncertainty, indeed, would hold it to be our necessary condition.

This era, too, will give way. We all recognize that echo chambers are a problem and that we have produced a situation where ideologies routinely talk past each other. The challenge is to alter our desires and forms of life in such a way as to move beyond our current era. We must move beyond, rather than back to the "good old" days of modernism, because we cannot unlearn the ways in which our rationality is affected by more than reason, the ways that reason can be used to manipulate, and the ways in which we are situated in cultures.

In pursuing these desires, however, we have cut ourselves off from the genuine community which comes only where conflict can occur and from the pursuit of objective truth, that is, truth which can be recognized by any who genuinely and carefully seek it. We fail, then, to achieve recognition for our claims to objective truth, because our claims are recognized merely as a truth of the community we are in, not as objective truth, that is, the truth of, in principle, everyone. Hegel would claim, I think, that this kind of recognition occurs in the state, and this would account for the way in which the legal system is weaponized by all sides against their opponents in arguments about what is good.

At some point, I hope, we will recognize that we have merely substituted one kind of conflict for another. In seeking recognition for our claims to possess objective truth, we have attempted to wrest it unilaterally from each other by force of law, thus pressing us into a conflict which must end in either annihilation or subjugation of the other view. We are engaging, in other words, in something very similar to a community-level or thought-level occurrence of Hegel's master-slave dialectic. We are operating at a different level, but the same dynamics of conflict are at work, and both ordinary conclusions will be unsatisfactory because they will not prove the truth claims to be objective.

This post has gone long enough. I will end by summarizing. We are not postmodern, but are distinctly not postmodern. Nevertheless, we possess an inheritance from postmodernism which affects how we live, and casts light on our present predicament. When seen in this light, we can see that our present predicament, too, must pass on into a further stage of culture, and cannot retreat to an apparently better age.

Knowledge-Of and -That

To finish off this mini-series about kinds of knowledge, I want to consider the relationship between knowledge-of and knowledge-that. We have already said that both rely on knowledge-how. One might therefore think that one could have either one without the other. I have not given any reason to think otherwise.

Instead, I want to argue that they are equally basic but not independent. I do not claim that to possess knowledge-of one must also require knowledge-that or vice-versa, but that, if one can possess knowledge-of, then one can also possess knowledge-that, and vice-versa.

Knowledge-that requires the ability to use language to communicate to others what one knows and the ability to operate on propositions logically. This linguistic requirement entails the requirement that one be able to know others personally. To be able to communicate a proposition in a language, and thus, on my account, to know a proposition, one must know how to use language. The use of language, in turn, requires the ability to recognize others as possessing mentality, for instance, recognizing others as meaning something, as aiming at some goal, etc.

If one has this ability, then one is able to achieve knowledge-of people. Knowledge-of is built out of an understanding of the mental architecture, as it were, of another: the other's abiding mental features, such as their hopes and fears, the way they feel and think, etc. This underlying ability is, moreover, sufficient, together with a general capacity for knowledge in general (that is, the ability to retain this recognition), for knowledge-of, and likewise for language and knowledge-that.

This claim, that the ability to recognize others as possessing mentality is sufficient for learning language, may seem like an odd claim. It seems contentious whether animals possess such a capacity. I therefore owe an argument for that claim.

Particularly with respect to propositional knowledge, language's distinctive feature is its ability to refer to things and attribute predicates of those things. My claim is that our ability to recognize and know others' mental features, together with the ability to retain such knowledge, enables us to recognize objects as subject to referential relations, in part because it enables imaginative activity. We are able to retain another's attitudes toward things and thus are able to retain a kind of link between sounds and objects which is flexible enough for language. Attitudes which embed further attitudes depend on a reciprocity of this kind of knowledge of other minds--A fears that B hopes that C intends to come tomorrow--and permits this embedding in language and thereby permits full-fledged language.

This is just a sketch of my account, and others may run things differently, perhaps arguing that language enables what I have counted as the more basic capacities. The problem with running it backwards is that it makes it harder to account for the origin of language if one needs language in order to recognize others as minded. If we instead suppose that humans come into the world with certain capacities to recognize others, and that language builds on this, then we can account for the origin of language without magic.

Personal Knowledge

In the previous two posts, I have focused on knowledge-how and knowledge-that. There is a third kind of knowledge which might be called knowledge-of. Knowledge-of is also called personal knowledge. It is the knowledge one has of people when one says one knows them. If I know about someone, I merely possess knowledge-that certain facts obtain regarding that person. If I know them, I can predict their actions and understand them.

The obvious question, after yesterday's post, is whether knowledge-how is more or less basic than knowledge-of. I think knowledge-how is the more basic of the two, and thus, barring further kinds of knowledge, the most basic kind of knowledge. Why do I think this?

Let me first raise an objection to my view. One might say that knowledge of others is more basic than even capacities because it is how we gain capacities. We learn how to act by observing others acting, and we learn how to respond to various events by watching others respond. On this account, a capacity would be something more than a possible action. It would have to be an possible action which could also fail to occur, so that I learn that there is more than the obvious thing to do by observing that others respond differently. If we were to define capacities in this manner, I think this account would be right. I also think that it would make knowledge-how unnecessary for knowledge-that and capacities unnecessary for knowledge-how. I will return to this point below.

When we get to know others, we gain capacities. If I know you well, I have certain capacities: the capacity to predict how you will respond to certain claims, foods, or environments. The capacity to understand your train of thought. The capacity to recognize you by how you walk, or how you talk. Many of these capacities are subtle and unconscious. Someone who knows of me only by reading these posts may know a great deal about how I think through things and what my views on things are, but such a reader will not know how I operate in real-time conversations, nor what certain faces I make mean, let alone what I like to eat or the way my thoughts flow when they are not written. These are a particular sort of knowledge-how. Humans generally have the know-how required to get to know each other. What is peculiar about knowledge-of, and what sets it apart from knowledge-how and knowledge-that, is that it is based on knowledge of another's dispositions, another's knowledge-how and -that, and it can rarely if ever be fully communicated. Knowledge-of is peculiar, then, because it manifests the peculiar human sensitivity to others as other selves like ourselves.

Propositional Knowledge

I suggested yesterday that knowledge is more basically knowledge-how than knowledge-that. In other words that knowledge is more basically knowledge of how to do things than knowledge of propositions. In this post, I want to articulate a view of propositional knowledge which builds on yesterday's account. One might easily have thought, given yesterday's post, that I would simply reduce all knowledge to capacities--that is basically where I left the discussion in yesterday's post.

While I do claim that all knowledge involves capacities, knowledge-that is distinctive in the kinds of capacities it involves. Knowledge-that involves a particular kind of linguistic capacities. The knowledge of a language uses linguistic capacities of a different sort--the ability to say things in French is a kind of knowledge-how, but not, in itself, a kind of knowledge-that. When one knows a proposition, one can work linguistically and logically with that proposition to derive further knowledge.

If I know where my wife is, there are two kinds of capacities which I may possess. I may have the ability to go find my wife. Stopping here, all I need to have is know-how. I may also have the ability to state where she is, and to make inferences based on the articulation of that claim. I can also transfer the information to others in a particular fashion, that is, without directly exhibiting other capacities. I could teach you how to find my wife be showing you my own capacity to find her, just as most of us learn physical activities partially by watching others do the actions involved and mimicking them, but if I need you to go get her for me, then that will not help. Propositions are able to package some capacities with them, given shared background understandings, in such a way that we can teach those capacities more efficiently. One may need to understand the field in order to understand the proposition and thus gain the capacities--it is not enough to be able to repeat the proposition--yet this is a distinction between knowledge-how and knowledge-that. This account leaves know-how as the more basic of the two, but does not completely reduce knowledge-that to knowledge-how.

One might respond that I have reduced knowledge-that to knowledge-how, since I have given an account of knowledge-that in terms of capacities, albeit a particular kind of capacity. In a sense, this is right, but I have not simply defined every instance of knowledge as identical to a set of capacities. This can be applied more broadly: two individuals can know how to play baseball equally well, yet have different baseball-relevant capacities: one might throw farther, the other might run faster. The two individuals might even know equally well how to throw a baseball, yet one might have torn a ligament in his shoulder and thus lack the capacity. So knowledge is not just capacities. Nevertheless, the basis of knowledge is formed by capacities.

So, to refine my claim: capacities are more basic than knowledge-how, and knowledge-how is, in turn more basic than knowledge-that. Each one adds to the prior and goes beyond it, so that it might exist apart from it. I can know a proposition without being able to do anything with it, but I can only know propositions because they usually enable me to make use of information contained in them, and my knowledge of a currently useless proposition presumes that it might become useful to me, perhaps after I have learned more about the field it is about. Similarly, knowledge-how may occur without capacities, but I can only possess knowledge-how because I can possess capacities, and I can only be said to know how to do something without possessing the capacity to do it now under the assumption that I might possess the capacity should I be in a suitable position to use my know-how.

Learning, The Nature of Knowledge, and Dewey

learning involves someone coming to know something something which the learner did not know before. Thus, it involves a transmission from not knowing to knowing. I suspect that this gives us a hint as to the nature of knowledge. I will finish with a note on how our understanding of knowledge might affect our pedagogy by noting how John Dewey's account, which is similar to the one I push for here, affected his pedagogy.

To learn something requires that one be able to do something with it. If I teach you the definition of a term, and you cannot apply the term accurately, I will not say that you have learned the term. Learning, then, whether learning a sport or learning an academic subject, involves the acquisition of capacities. Thus, knowledge is practical: it involves possessing abilities. Or, to put it another way: learning is practical: it involves gaining new capacities (I do not, at this point, make a distinction between an ability and a capacity).

The puzzles about knowledge which this helps us address are multiple. The first one I want to address, however, is about the nature of a state of knowledge. Given my claim that learning involves gaining capacities and that knowledge entails possessing such capacities, it is not entirely clear whether we gain the capacities and thus gain knowledge or gain knowledge which necessarily provides us with the capacities. To put it another way: are the capacities equivalent to the knowledge or merely a symptom of the knowledge?

Think about how we teach things. We may talk, and articulate propositions, and even expect the student to be able to regurgitate some of these propositions, but the end goal is always a kind of action. If we are teaching mathematics, we give students problems to solve, and we measure the students' understanding by their ability to solve the problems. The focus on abilities is even clearer in sports or languages, where the entire goal is to form certain capacities, not to have the students be able to regurgitate propositions on command.

This does not mean that knowledge just is the capacities we teach. However, it strongly suggests that knowledge is not chiefly knowledge of propositions, which it is frequently taken to be by those who think that knowledge merely results in abilities. The basic kind of knowledge, to use more technical terms, is more likely to be knowledge-how than knowledge-that.

This should help explain why a pragmatist like Dewey develops the kind of pedagogical approach he does. Pragmatists tend to hold that what matters about a proposition is its use-value: what one does with it. They thus tend to hold much closer to a view of knowledge as consisting in capacities than others. Dewey's pedagogy relies a huge amount on having students interacting practically with the subject matter, because he believed that the closer you can tie the point of an action--the capacities whose development is being developed in teaching the subject--to teaching it, the easier it is to learn. That is, he generalizes from the claim that one cannot learn to play baseball except by playing baseball to the claim that one cannot learn, for instance, biology, without actually doing biology, whereas the default mode of teaching is to teach the products of biology.

Empiricism and Theism

In this post, I would like to spend some time reflecting on the relationship between empiricism and theism. By empiricism I mean the thesis that all knowledge is mediated through the senses. By theism, of course, I mean the thesis that there is a God. More strongly, by theism I mean the thesis that there is a God who is active in the physical world and who is not a part of the physical world.

One way to make sure these two thesis are compatible would be to suppose that we have senses which relate us to God directly, or to immaterial things of one kind or another. I am more interested in a stronger kind of empiricism which would say that all knowledge is mediated through the senses and the only senses available to us are those which relate us to ordinary sensible things, such as extended, colored, odorous, loud, painful, sour, or rough things.

In the Bible, God appears in visible and audible form in both the Old and New Testament. So God is not excluded from taking part in the sensible world, although he is not limited by it. In the New Testament, we find God the Son taking on human form and thus becoming a physical being. The apostles refer to empirical data in arguing for the Gospel, pointing to what they and others have seen and what can be empirically verified--not merely the accounts of others then living, but inferences to the best explanation regarding their own behavior: the apostles ask others to look at their lives and choose between self-consciously crazy and honest.

So an empirical account of knowledge can account for knowledge of an active God. There are arguments for God's existence and claims about God's nature which appear to be excluded by an empirical account, however. Introspective arguments for the existence of God cannot obviously be accommodated, and it likewise seems hard to say how we could know attributes of God which appear non-empirical, such as his omnipotence or simplicity.

Let us begin with an example of an introspective argument for God's existence. One which I am strongly sympathetic to is C.S. Lewis's argument from desire. It goes as follows: I have a longing which cannot be satisfied in this world. The best explanation for why I would have any given longing is that it is supposed to be satisfied. A longing which cannot be satisfied in this world thus requires me to suppose another world where it can be satisfied. This is not an argument directly for God's existence, but for heaven, which cannot easily be separated from God's existence.

Can we account for this argument in empirical terms? I think we can. The second premise could be arrived at through induction from empirical observation or through the presumption of the goodness of creation (more on that presumption in another post). The first premise is an observation about oneself which might be noticed by introspecting, but might also be noticed by observing one's own behavior. Indeed, the argument is stronger if one has the premise that not only I, but all those around me have this intense longing which nothing in this world can satisfy. Introspection need not be non-empirical. Some introspection, at least, is transparent, that is, to introspect one looks outward. To introspect one's desires, one looks at the world and sees what draws one.

Next, let us address God's omnipotence. To claim that God is omnipotent is to claim that God has the power to do whatever he wants. To arrive at such a claim we do not need to observe God doing everything he might want to do, but merely a representative sample. If God can raise someone from the dead who has been dead for a while, we infer that he can raise someone from the dead who has been dead for less time, and perhaps for more time. If God can part a sea, calm a sea, and stir up a sea we infer that he has tremendous control over seas. As we notice many such cases where God exhibits tremendous power, and as we hear God claim that he can do anything which he says he will do, we infer that God can do anything he pleases. This is actually a relatively simple case, since God reveals himself as a tremendously powerful God. He does not use the term "omnipotent," but he does claim such superlative power that it is hard not to think that he would use the term if his audience was simply philosophers and theologians rather than also fishermen, shepherds, and children.

Finally, let us consider a more esoteric attribute of God: simplicity. I am not convinced that we need to attribute simplicity to God, but an account of how we learn about God probably should not entail anything one way or the other on the matter. To claim that God is simple is to claim that he is not composed of parts. It is usually derived from the claim that he is not dependent on anything that is not himself for his existence. Thus, it is argued, God cannot be dependent on the existence of any parts to compose him. So, God cannot be dependent on there being such a property as "being loving," and he cannot be dependent on there being such a property as "being omnipotent" (one needn't think that such properties have any real existence apart from their instantiation, anyway, but that is, again, for another post).

Now, if all one means by God's being simple is that God is not composed of parts which he depends on, then one can get there pretty easily. We know that God is not a physical being. There is no evidence that God parts could, even in principle, split off of God. So, sure, we can accept the claim that God is simple. If one is inclined to reject the claim, it is likely because of a conflicting understanding of the Trinity. The point I am trying to make, however, is that simplicity is a functional attribute. If we claim that God is simple, we are claiming that the way God has revealed himself is best explained by means of the concept of simplicity. We do not need to see God's simplicity or omnipotence in order to know that God is simple or omnipotent.

Empiricism is not the claim that we can only know about sensible things, but that we can only know anything via sensibility. God has revealed himself through sensible things, and all theological argument goes by way of that revelation. The text of scripture is sensible, the words God did and the actions he performed had sensible effects.

Platonic Epistemology

A platonic epistemology holds that our ability to know something as defective is dependent on there being a perfect thing of its kind which we, at least implicitly, know, and thus which we can compare the defective thing to. Thus, to know that a line is crooked, we must know some straight line well enough to compare the crooked line to the straight one and thereby see that the crooked line is unlike the straight line.

In language, the meaning of a term is given in part by the possibility of using a different term to mean something else. That is, there is a contrastive element to meaning. The term 'dark' contrasts with the term 'light', and the term 'crooked' contrasts with the term 'straight'. Platonic epistemology takes this to apply to knowledge, too. So far, so good. If there could be no circumstance where the use of a term would be inappropriate, it would be, like, meaningless.

Platonic epistemology takes a further step however. It claims that the term on at least one side of any spectrum must have a referent. Thus, a platonist would claim that for 'light' to have meaning there must be a perfect light, and that for us to use the term 'light' perfectly, we must somehow know this perfect light. This strikes me as implausible and otiose. We do not need a perfect light to understand what darkness is, or even what imperfect(ly bright? or white?) light is. We do not need to know perfect equality to recognize near-but-not-quite equality. We simply need to recognize that there are conceivable cases which would be more equal, brighter, whiter, etc., and conceivability need not entail actuality. It need not even entail possibility.

The puzzle for any platonic epistemology is to explain how we come to know the perfect things. Given that they do not seem to need to appear in the world of sensation, it is unclear where we are supposed to have learned them. On any theory where we know what perfect goodness, truth, and beauty are like, it would have to provide a merely implicit knowledge, since otherwise one cannot account for disagreement. Plato's theory was that we were alive in the world of the Forms before we were born. Christian Platonists hold that the perfect things are ideas in the mind of God. I am only really interested in the latter.

In order to fill the role which perfect things are supposed to fill in a platonic epistemology, ideas in the mind of God would need to be made accessible to us in some manner. One way would be for God to immediately transfer them into our minds. Another way would be for us to, as it were, look into the mind of God instead of a platonic heaven of ideas. In either case, we are presumed to walk around with implicit knowledge of perfection of various sorts waiting to be triggered by seeing things in the world which relate to them.

But if we are presumed to walk around with mere knowledge of such things, then the need for the perfect things per se seems to have dropped out. Why not dispose with the perfect things, at least as a criterion of being able to recognize imperfect things, and just leave the implicit knowledge? If one does this, then one is back at the point where one has a conception of more white, etc., and since one has already granted that the knowledge involved is implicit, one may go a further step and suppose that the implicit knowledge is not conceptual knowledge but rather embedded in one's perceptual and cognitive capacities. That is, perhaps we do not so much know what it would be like for something to be whiter, as we have a visual system which can simulate varying degrees of whiteness and represent this degree of whiteness thus and so. Likewise, the visual system may simply process visual stimuli in such a way that we recognize straightness as a norm embedded in how we perceive, rather than as a concept to which we must compare lines. It is notable in this respect that there is variation in what different people recognize as perfection of different colors.

Grounding Logic

It is commonly held that deductive logic is properly basic, that is, that it does not need to be grounded in anything else. Thus, a fine response to "why does logic work" is held to be, "because it does, are you crazy?" I do not quite disagree with this position, but, while our belief in the propositions of basic deductive logic may be properly basic, our belief that our belief in those propositions is properly basic is not, itself, properly basic.

I am going after two questions which come out as one. Why does logic work? And, What makes something properly basic?

Logic may be considered as nothing more than a bunch of symbols and their rules of use, together defined to as to be tautologous. Thus, in symbolic logic, I am conjoining symbols which stand for possible truth values by means of operators which are defined in terms of what outputs they give for each set of input truth values. In this case, however, logic still rests on the principle of non-contradiction. In this way, it is, thus far, circular.

If I have a pair of propositions, p and q, and know their truth values--I know both p and q to be true, for example--then I also know the truth value of the conjunction p & q. The system is defined so that the conjunction is given by the truth-values of the input propositions p and q. In the system, it is a matter of definition that if p is true and q is true, then p & q is true. Likewise for any of the other symbols and their outputs.

Thus far, however, there is nothing grounding the correspondence of the system to the world. If the principle of non-contradiction does not hold in the world, then logic is useless. On what basis can we claim that the principle of non-contradiction, and thus logic in general, actually holds of the (messy) world?

If we lack logic, then most of this paper will turn out to be self-refuting, and we will be left with no reason not to hold that the principle of non-contradiction holds. A refutation of logic will have to rely on some kind of logic. However, a proof of logic, while it will involve logic, need not be useless. The grounding of logic will show why logic works for us, and thus may allow us to see what may be included in logic which has not, thus far, been included, or been included more warily, etc.

Essentially, the grounding of logic will be the grounding of a properly basic belief, viz., that the principle of non-contradiction applies to reality. It will thus, if successful, form a case-study for what makes something properly basic.

Suppose non-contradiction does not apply. If that is the case, then, besides the fact that we have as yet no reason not to hold that the principle also does apply, we also are left with no confidence on which to rest our actions. For any belief we might act on, we have no reason not to also hold of the belief that it is false. In order to go on with our lives, in order to live, we must act according to the belief that some proposition, or some category of propositions, is true rather than false. We must hold, that is, that we have reason to act in this way, and that it is not the case that we have no reason to act in this way.

This is not a logical argument per se. Although it does rely on a logical form. What the argument draws out, is, however, the basis proper: our inability to go on without this principle grounds our use of this principle. This is an experienced fact which does not rely on logical form. We are compelled to adopt this principle by nature, that is, by our very make-up, by our being agents who act for reasons. Our very need to act rather than merely happen to behave gives us a need for reasons which may be relied on. Thus, we need the principle of non-contradiction in order to be as humans.

Thus far, however, this basis lacks grounds itself. Before going on to ground it, however, I want to point out what this grounding is not: it is not a pragmatic grounding. I am not arguing that, because we cannot go on without this principle, we ought to treat the principle as true, but that, because we cannot go on without this principle, the principle is, in fact, true. This shows how much in need of grounding this basis, our inability to go on without the principle, needs to be grounded qua basis.

Essentially, the principle now in need of grounding is the movement from a human need for something to its existence. This is a far more disputed principle. We have gone from the more certain to the less certain, and are asking the less certain to ground the more certain. This would be a bad thing if we were trying to prove to each other that logic works, but the dispute in our actual case is over how we can know that logic works. I am trying to show that this is a solid basis for our trust in logic, and thus a place from which to appeal for beliefs being properly basic, rather than that for these reasons you should trust logic to work.

So, then, why should we hold that because humans need a certain belief in order to go on, that belief is true? I noted that this is not a pragmatic move. However, it is close, and we will move through the pragmatic point of view to arrive at the non-pragmatic acceptance.

First, because we need this principle in order to go on, we cannot but hold this principle. To dispute this principle in action is to give up agency. Our choice is between agency and giving up the principle of non-contradiction. We cannot give up agency, as that would be an act of agency, and thus self-refuting. We would be affirming by our actions that agency both exists and cannot exist. Insofar as agency relies on non-contradiction, and giving up agency violates non-contradiction, agency and non-contradiction rise and fall together.

We are stuck as agents, however. The only way to get rid of all our agency is to rid ourselves of life. Even in our most capricious moments, we exercise some degree of agency. Thus, giving up non-contradiction consigns us, or at least prompts us, to a final act of irrational agency into death--suicide.

Suicide is a negating of self and world in one act. It is a denial of the world's fit to me, and to accept that the world finally fails to fit me grounds such an act as, if not rational, at least no less rational than continued attempts to conform to reality. To deny that the world fits me, which is what is required by denying non-contradiction, is to give up the possibility of a rational existence in the world.

The choice, then, is between my basic fit to the world or death: to hold that I can live, or that I cannot live (though this degree of binarity is exclusive only from the side of basic fit). Thus, either non-contradiction holds, or humanity lives in a world which rejects it. In this latter case, we are no part of the world, but foreign to it. To hold that non-contradiction does not really hold, that it is a useful fiction, even, is to deny a fit between myself and the world which, if true, undermines my ability to make my way through the world. A pragmatic affirmation of non-contradiction does not leave me solidly enough fit to the world, but leaves the possibility of a final lack of fit somewhere down the line on precisely this point. It leaves life uncertain of itself.

To get to the solid truth of the principle of non-contradiction, then, it is necessary to exclude our own death from our choices. Essentially, what we have said is, however, precisely what is noted by most who hold that some beliefs are properly basic: you must be crazy, out of touch with the world, in order to deny these beliefs. Our options have been shown to be between absurdity or this properly basic belief.

There is a degree of circularity to my argument around the edges. I assume that neither death nor absurdity are live options for most of us, and thus that we must choose the principle of non-contradiction. Some will accept absurdity, however, particularly at the edges of their lives. I am arguing that the degree of absurdity here is one which reaches deeply into our lives, that to reject these beliefs in words can never square with our lives so long as we live. Thus, the degree of absurdity moves beyond words and into daily actions, and thus presses us toward death if we deny these basic beliefs.

I am confident that any who agree with my argument will not disagree with my choice in favor of non-contradiction and other properly basic beliefs, since, were they to choose otherwise, they would not remain long for this world. Is this not merely pragmatic? Perhaps it would be, except that I hold that the world must basically fit us. One may arrive at this from any number of directions, whether evolution or theism. It is another principle which is embedded in how we live.

Here I have not grounded the principle that what we need in order to go on exists on some further principle, but have simply laid out our choices as I see them, and thereby, likely, helped show what I mean by "go on." This is a basic principle in all my philosophy: that it is (always for everyone) possible to live, to go on, or, put another way, that suicide is, in every case, irrational given reality. I am not sure it is possible to fully ground it further, but it is the point at which epistemology and ethics become one in life as lived, and thus why I sometimes speak of my philosophy as existential.

Thus, my argument is:
1. There must be some way to tell what beliefs are properly basic,
2. Here is a basis for a properly basic belief (that non-contradiction holds).
3. This basis is satisfactory.
4. Thus, this basis may be appealed to in other cases.

If I am correct, then a certain kind of human need for a belief in order to go on grounds that belief. This does not mean that there can be no other bases for properly basic beliefs. If it is the only satisfactory basis, however, then beliefs will be properly basic if and only if humans have a need for them in this way.

I suspect, but will not show here (as the argument itself has been put forth by C. S. Lewis and others elsewhere), that one can reach a belief in something quite like heaven from this point. There is also only a slight stretch from here to reach the need of a salvation which is not by works but by grace. In brief, since: if it is by works, then we may reach a point of no return of failure--a final failure that is irremediable, and thus disfits us to the world. This latter relies on the "always for everyone" in my principle, and someone else may prefer a more restrained principle, but I see no reason to privilege some positions with respect to this principle over others. I do not doubt that the principle may be used wrongly, to reach false conclusions, wherein we may find us using the arguments in both directions: some as modus tollens, others as modus ponens. If you hold you need x to go on, and I hold that x is not available to you, then I will also hold that you do not, truly and deeply, need x in order to go on.