by Kolbitar » May 23rd, 2009, 2:19 pm
Hey Dave, and all.
Victor Reppert states in his book The Dangerous Idea (p.57), that some people take Lewis to be implying an inferential theory of knowledge, and Victor goes on to say that it’s not necessary to assume that. Apart from Reppert’s comment, I had wondered the same thing, but concluded, likewise, that I need not assume that.
To begin, Lewis states, in a number of places, that everything but the present moment is inferred; a statement by which I think he involves our senses in a direct perception of the physical world. From that perception, moreover, we conceive ideas; this is important because he also states that knowledge must be caused by the thing known, which he confesses might be considered a (CE) cause, but a special one, having no comparison with physical (CE). The reason the two (CE) causes differ lies in the “aboutness” of the former. In other words, I don’t know my ideas, I know through my ideas – my ideas are about the thing I know, not the thing I know. Naturalism, however, implies that it’s not the thing we know, which involves a “wholly immaterial relation”, but our own mental states – that is, our own mind. Now, if we take inference to mean what Lewis elsewhere calls a chain of reasoning, then he says it involves three things: facts, intuition, and arranging the facts to produce a proof (discursiveness). If the facts, however, are not about things but are mental states, then there is nothing to arrange into “intuitable steps”, thus there is no “reasoning.”
Dave, you write:
“For the materialist or some materialists, with whom I am inclined to agree, I think the cup is there because (CE) the cup itself causes certain sensations.”
But, you see, it is the cup itself which also has to cause the idea of the cup, and this cannot be without the “aboutness” of knowledge – that ideas are about the thing, not the thing we know. Lewis consistently can be seen to imply that the objects of our ideas come through sense perception, are then discursively arranged in intuitable steps, and are in this sense inferred from sensation so that he does not mean we are not directly aware of the cup. Moreover, Lewis confesses you may call this knowing-by-the-thing-known a (CE) cause, but, he says, it’s entirely unique, and is, I believe, how he solves the fact that it must be an event (CE) cause as well as a (GC) cause. In fact, as I tiredly go over some of his arguments I have before me, it seems to me the whole of the argument is not (CE) vs. (GC), but also includes the one, unique type of (CE) involved in (GC) vs. the other type of (CE). Given the unique type of (CE), it is the thing itself which we know about, which is the cause of our ideas; however, given the non-rational (CE), devoid of “aboutness”, it must be our mental state itself, that is, our own mind, of which we are aware. However, “mind” is inferred, that is, it must be known about, and since there is no aboutness therefore there is no mind for my ideas to be “about”.
I think this agrees with what he says elsewhere, “It is as if… when I knocked out my pipe, the ashes arranged themselves into letters which read: ‘We are the ashes of a knocked-out pipe.’ But if the validity of knowledge cannot be explained that way, and if perpetual happy coincidence throughout the whole of recorded time is out of the question, then surely we must seek the real explanation elsewhere.” And, “If so, then all our present thoughts are mere accidents — the accidental by-product of the movement of atoms. And this holds for the thoughts of the materialists and astronomers as well as for anyone else’s. But if their thoughts — i.e. of materialism and astronomy — are merely accidental by-products, why should we believe them to be true? I see no reason for believing that one accident should be able to give me a correct account of all the other accidents. It’s like expecting that the accidental shape taken by the splash when you upset a milkjug should give you a correct account of how the jug was made and why it was upset.”
To put it in more modern terms, if thought is an epiphenomenon of matter, that is, a projection on the screen of our minds caused by matter, then it’s the projection itself of which we’re immediately aware. But once you admit that it’s the projection itself of which we’re aware, then there’s no possible way outside of that claim, for to go outside of it would be to claim aboutness of the object of knowledge -- “aboutness” always includes the object of which the idea is about. Again, to say our mental representations are the sole objects of knowledge is to admit, at the same time, that that which they supposedly represent remains outside of knowledge, a statement which, therefore, has no meaning – for by definition you don’t, and can’t, “know” them.
The man who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living Church is a man always expecting to meet Plato and Shakespeare tomorrow at breakfast. He is always expecting to see some truth that he has never seen before. --Chesterton
Sober Inebriation:
http://soberinebriationblog.blogspot.com/