Things You should know about Knowing. Part 2

Themes: On Language, Philosophy

I choose to start the story here. Also, if you don’t want to wade through lots of guff, you can skip to point 10.

The Scientist

The Solipsist is now quietly crying into his beer, so you decide to call it a night. The Scientist and The Conversationalist took off yonks ago – only you would be daft enough to try to discuss Epistemology with an epishtemogled Solipist. But don’t despair, the path to wisdom is strewn with stewed Solipsists.

The following day you call The Scientist to see if he’d be willing to chew through THE QUESTION with you. He answers the phone by pretending it’s a StarTrek Communicator. You feel deflated. You manage to get him to agree to meet you for lunch then hang up before he can say, “Live long and Prosper!” (Even the path to wisdom can only handle a limited amount of StarTrekkin’).

You meet in The Refectory at the University, The Scientist is sipping instant coffee out of the lid of a Thermos he’s brought from home. There are x+1 number of things you need to know in order survive this situation:

1. Embrace the existential shudder you will inevitably feel as you sit down at the table. The Universe is reminding you that it still exists: that in a quiet corner of reality somewhere a wildflower dances with the wind; that the smell of hot grass and eucalyptus still talks; and that you might belong to this world in subtle, unexpected ways.
If you are overcome by a sudden Whitmanesque desire to jump on the table and bellow ‘YAWP!!!’ Do it.
Don’t expect anyone to care.

2. The Scientist is suspiciously like the mirror image of The Solipsist (could it be that this scenario is just a little too neat?). Whereas the Solipsist begins from the good intuition that all our knowledge of the world takes place from within our unique standpoint (place, time, experiences, faculties), the Scientist is fascinated by the insight that if our knowledge is to be genuinely of the world, then doesn’t just consist in stating the contents of our heads.
Sounds right, doesn’t it?

3. The problem arises when the Scientist gets carried away by the objectivity of knowledge and starts to claim that knowledge only consists in those things which exist independently of the person knowing them.

4. This claim immediately presents us with a problem: how do we sort out real Knowledge (i.e., that which exists independently of the person knowing) from mere Opinion (i.e., claims that have far too much to do with what the knower is drinking)?

5. Solipsists don’t have this problem because ultimately they don’t really believe in a difference between knowledge and opinion. But because Solipsists only rarely pop into existence the majority of the history of Epistemology is devoted to working on this problem.
(not the non-existence of solipsists, the other problem (see point 4))

6. The kind of Scientist that you are likely to be meeting in the Refec, will probably solve this problem by giving a strictly empirical definition of knowledge: i.e., he will claim that ‘knowledge’ only occurs when a particular claim can be backed up with a particular kind of evidence (experimental), and for which this evidence can be independently verified (or more properly, falsified), and most importantly, for which general rules can be framed that will be observable by others in relevantly similar situations.
(Yes, that was one long sentence…)

7. You be a lunatic to deny the power of this definition when applied in the context of scientific method.
But what is it power to do?
Largely, it is power to make accurate predictions about the future behaviour of material features of the world based on accurate observation of past patterns. It is about framing rules that explain causes.
And boy does it work!

8. But if we get too swept away with the Scientist’s strictly empirical definition of knowledge, then we end up thinking we only genuinely know two kinds of things: first, the immediate impressions of the world we get through our senses; secondly, the rules of causation which we arrive at when we have properly applied empirical methodology.

9. This restriction is difficult to swallow:
First, it’s very hard to point to anything that seems even remotely like ‘an immediate impression’, or ‘a pure observation’ of the world. Everything that we see, hear, feel, whatever other sense you might possess, has already worked its way through a cognitive process that has irretrievably synthesised these naked impressions into a larger experience. So, when Bruce the Bagman comes and sits down next to me at the bar, I don’t have a naked impression of Bruce’s smell which I can describe independent of my feelings of like or dislike, or the memories it evokes, or even the cultural vocabulary by which smells are described. Bruce’s eau, is definitely and irretrievably du toilet…
Of course, we can describe the mechanisms by which this might work, electrical impulses, the different centres of the brain, but that isn’t actually the same as actually experiencing the naked impression. There is really no way to get ‘behind-the-scenes’ in your mind, and see the ‘world-as-it-is-in-itself.’

Secondly, if we are sceptical about ‘pure observation’, then its also very difficult to accept that ‘rules of causal behaviour’ is a category significantly broad enough to cover the sorts of things we mean when we use the word ‘knowledge’. For example, it doesn’t seem like a satisfactory account of what it means for me to say, “I know Bruce.” Most of us would accept that “I know Bruce” is more than a claim to possess a great deal of empirical evidence about Bruce and that I can accurately form causal predictions about his future behaviour on the basis of my past observations (not for a minute denying that this is a valid and humorous activity in which to pass the hours).
If you asked me to back up my claim that I know Bruce, I would point to the kinds of things that Bruce and I have shared together, not merely the quality of the observations I have made of him.

Furthermore, things like ‘rules of causation’ have had a very hard time gaining purchase when it comes to the study of causally complex things like humans. And it gets even harder the smaller the population of people you are seeking to deal with. In fact, it is nonsensical to speak of general rules that would describe every aspect of an individual human life. Rules stated at that level of specificity are not rules at all, they are people.

10. I’ve rabbited on long enough…
Here’s the conclusion of the matter for now:
I’ve been in enough debates down the Pub to know that most of what we discuss in that August Hall of Disputation revolves around whether particular claims to knowledge, are in fact, objectively true.
It usually goes like this:
Dave: “It is, in fact, the case that Bruce here, is a dead-set legend, and once drank a schooner of horse tranquilliser and still walked home.
(some murmurs of approval, a few mutters of disagreement… someone throws a chair.)
Trevor: “What are your warrants for that claim, Dave?”
(Trevor, Dave, Bruce, and Others, proceed to cite evidence and question the logic for and against the position. This may or may not include arm-wrestling.)
My point is simply this: the claim that knowledge is (in some sense) ‘objective’, is important for our belief that we can actually live with, work, drink, and persuade each other. Debating Solipsists is a recipe for Mental Illness. However, our claims for objectivity in knowledge can’t be made in such a way that we ‘depersonalise’ the character of all our knowledge.

What do we do?
How do we keep an eye on Scylla, while surfing Charybdis?

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A Fork

Themes: On Language, Philosophy, Representation

Words are like cups or forks or jumbo jets or carpet. The ontology of language is not to be separated out from general ontology.
Theories of language have been betwitched by Platonic ontology.
The assumption that language is essentially about reference is just another manifestation of the Platonic ontological claim that the essence of a thing is found, not in itself, but in an independently existing Form.
We basically got over it in general ontology, but in popular versions of the philosophy of language we are still haunted by the Platonic ghost.
Words do not refer to things or anything.

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Deep Pass Campground

Themes: On Language, Places

I went camping on the weekend, up on the edge of the Wollemi Wilderness area.
I’ve never really been into the Blue Mountains, sure there are some nice looking rocks but the whole place is so utterly infested with people that I could never find it relaxing. I think I’m on the way to revising my opinion.
The Wollemi Wilderness is the largest wilderness area in NSW – a gigantic patch of nothing but gum trees and canyons. Deep Pass, where I camped, is a walk-in only campsite. There is a fire trail that takes you to within a kilometre of the site and then you have to walk down the side of the valley and along the bottom of a canyon to get to the site. The fire trail wasn’t marked on my map so I found it through a combination of GPS, luck, trial and error.
It’s worth it.
I could hear a wombat grazing from 50m away.
That was 50 metres of unsullied quiet.
Quiet is a threatened species. It requires large habitats and complex ecosystems.
Isn’t it Quiet that enables a word to be heard?
In fact, quiet plays its part, not only in enabling us to hear, but in constituting words in themselves, it is the spaces between words that gives them form.
Language is the interpenetration between silence and sound.

Ironically, wilderness areas which were declared to preserve vulnerable physical habitats from rapine human consumption, may end up being the last resort for the fraying edges of human quiet.

Quiet will camp in small tents in the remote wilderness,
without any form of power generation.
It will always have a billy ready beside the fire,
just in case someone should drop by for a bit of it.
And not particularly mind if they don’t.

Quiet lives within cooeee of the Burning Bush

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Propositional Revelation

Themes: Doctrine, On Knowing God, On Language

I remember sitting in my Dad’s car a few years ago and having a ding-dong theological argument with him over the question of propositional revelation. He was telling me about something that he had been reading which suggested that restricting God’s revelation of himself to a merely propositional form was overly reductive. I was stirred to the heights of undergraduate fervour and waded in to defend the Truth of The Gospel.
“How could there be such a thing as non-propositional revelation?” I demanded. “If it is not propositional then it is nothing, it is not intelligible, it is not a revelation.”

Interestingly, propositional revelation was the subject of our doctrine class today, and I find that I’m not completely on the same page that I used to be. Sometimes my whole life seems to be a process of working out what my Dad was talking about.

Our class today was a strong defence of the primacy of propositional revelation. In fact, I’m being generous – there were definite points at which it was claimed that there is no revelation other than propositional revelation. The discussion was heavily guided by D. B. Knox’s article entitled, Propositional Revelation, the Only Revelation. (Have a read).

It was an interesting, stimulating class. It’s always more interesting to be lectured by someone with whom you’re not sure you agree. As I sat and chewed over what we were being taught I had to conclude that I simply cannot agree with that statement, as expressed in the title of Knox’s article, if it is given its normal sense.

Put down your stones…

It turns out I’m not alone, Michael Jensen wrote a helpful blog post about the issue a couple of years ago, I wish more notice had been taken of his point.

There’s a couple of things I would add to Michael’s article.

First, the continued use of the phrase ‘propositional revelation’ with a idiomatic definition of ‘propositional’ fosters poor critique of other theories of revelation. In our class it was suggested that, ‘propositional’ in ‘propositional revelation’ should be “understood in the less rigorous sense, of truthful communication” (yes, that’s a quote). Surely, most people would agree that, on a charitable understanding, ‘truthful communication’ describes revelation per se. The addition of the adjective ‘propositional’ is intended to characterise the form of that truthful communication. If you are allowed to define your position this broadly, you can say whatever you like about competing theories, without really grappling with the questions a rival theory is trying to solve.

Someone like Pannenberg, or Brunner, would be a staunch defender of propositional revelation, if by this you simply meant, ‘truthful communication from God’. When they attack propositional revelation they are attacking a particular understanding of the form of that truthful communication. Either we hold the view they are attacking, or we do not. At least we should be clear.

Secondly, the problem we might have with Pannenberg, Brunner or others, in their attempts to understand revelation ‘non-propositionally’, is not really that they think the concept of ‘revelation’ is broader than ‘propositions’. We’ve already conceded that much. It is that they appear to be seeking a way around (or behind) the Scriptures for a kind of essential revelational bedrock.
As I understand it, Pannenberg wants to find the bedrock of revelation in the public history of Jesus, focussed upon the resurrection; Brunner, in the Divine-Human encounter.
Pannenberg and Brunner both appear to make Scripture a contingent element of revelation. Someone committed to ‘propositional revelation’ (in Knox’s sense) objects to this conclusion. The commitment to ‘propositional revelation’ is really the commitment to the essential role of the Scriptures in God’s revealing of himself.

The long and short of it is this,
I think my Dad was right, in that God’s communication of himself is not reducible to true or false statements about himself. And yet, God in his sovereign freedom communicates himself in an essential relation to the text of Scripture. I’m still working out what I think that means – intelligibly, linguistically, and?
But of this I’m pretty sure:

I believe in scriptural revelation.

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The Unheard Word

Themes: On Language, Poetry, Sermon, T.S. Eliot

V
If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent
If the unheard, unspoken
Word is unspoken, unheard;
Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard,
The Word without a word, the Word within
The world and for the world;
And the light shone in darkness and
Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled
About the centre of the silent Word.
(Ash Wednesday, T.S. Eliot)

“Then Pilate took Jesus and had Him flogged. The soldiers also twisted together a crown of thorns, put it on His head, and threw a purple robe around Him. And they repeatedly came up to Him and said, “Hail, King of the Jews!” and were slapping His face.
Pilate went outside again and said to them, “Look, I’m bringing Him outside to you to let you know I find no grounds for charging Him.”
Then Jesus came out wearing the crown of thorns and the purple robe. Pilate said to them, “Here is the man!”

When the chief priests and the temple police saw Him, they shouted, “Crucify! Crucify!” Pilate responded, “Take Him and crucify Him yourselves, for I find no grounds for charging Him.”
“We have a law,” the Jews replied to him, “and according to that law He must die, because He made Himself the Son of God.”
When Pilate heard this statement, he was more afraid than ever. He went back into the headquarters and asked Jesus, “Where are You from?” But Jesus did not give him an answer.” (John 19:1-9 HCSB)

Some poems have their own gravitational field that ensures you keep orbiting back at specific times or through certain circumstances. It’s nearly Easter, it’s the time for reading Ash Wednesday.
What I notice this time is that even the poetic density of Eliot’s description can’t comprehend the questions, the cries, and the silence, as the world seeks words with which to bind the Word.

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Wild Greeks

Themes: Exams, Moore College, On Language

Things went a little quiet around the site this past week. I’ve got a bit more Wilberforce to finish off but a Greek Exam created a bit of a hiccough.
The exam was on Friday afternoon from 2-4.

Really, I ask you, what maniac came up with that idea?

After the past fortnight dominated by Hebrew and Greek I’ve discovered that I actually love these crazy languages. Hebrew is a wild hairy beast of a language, wrestling with it makes me feel reconnected with my primal manliness.

… Am I suffering from Stockholm syndrome?

I’m discovering that as I struggle to read the New Testament in the original Greek I grasp again the original urgency of the Biblical writers.
The power of the Christian gospel produced such drama and texture in the words of these men.
My favourite passage in Greek (and I haven’t read a lot) is the first section of 1 John.

John strings together this long list of relative pronouns (‘what/that which’) – words that are supposed to refer back to a previously used noun. But it’s the start of the book and there are no previously used nouns for the relative pronoun to refer to. It creates this incredible sense of anticipation. John claims to have seen, touched, heard, that which was from the beginning – but what was it?

1 ὃ ἦν ἀπ’ ἀρχῆς ὃ ἀκηκόαμεν ὃ ἑωράκαμεν τοῖς ὀφθαλμοῖς ἡμῶν ὃ ἐθεασάμεθα καὶ αἱ χεῖρες ἡμῶν ἐψηλάφησαν περὶ τοῦ λόγου τῆς ζωῆς 2 καὶ ἡ ζωὴ ἐφανερώθη καὶ ἑωράκαμεν καὶ μαρτυροῦμεν καὶ ἀπαγγέλλομεν ὑμῖν τὴν ζωὴν τὴν αἰώνιον ἥτις ἦν πρὸς τὸν πατέρα καὶ ἐφανερώθη ἡμῖν 3 ὃ ἑωράκαμεν καὶ ἀκηκόαμεν ἀπαγγέλλομεν καὶ ὑμῖν ἵνα καὶ ὑμεῖς κοινωνίαν ἔχητε μεθ’ ἡμῶν καὶ ἡ κοινωνία δὲ ἡ ἡμετέρα μετὰ τοῦ πατρὸς καὶ μετὰ τοῦ υἱοῦ αὐτοῦ Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ
(1 John 1:1-3)

and in English

What was from the beginning,
what we have heard,
what we have seen with our eyes,
what we have observed,
and have touched with our hands,
concerning the Word of life—
that life was revealed,
and we have seen it
and we testify and declare to you
the eternal life that was with the Father
and was revealed to us—
what we have seen and heard
we also declare to you,
so that you may have fellowship along with us;
and indeed our fellowship is with the Father
and with His Son Jesus Christ.
(1 John 1:1-3 HSCB)  

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