Kenya epistemology lectures (Strathmore University)

MASTERS OF ARTS IN PHILOSOPHY & ETHICS MAPE 8102 The Development of Thinking, Knowledge and Science Prof. Miguel Garcia-Valdecasas, PhD. University of Navarra, [email protected]

[modified on 22 Aug 2016]

Table of contents 1. Introduction 2. On philosophy 3. What is knowledge? 3.1 Knowledge as a perfect act 3.2 Knowledge and belief 4. Truth 5. Sense-perception 5.1 The operation of the senses 5.2 The internal senses 5.3 The common sensorial 5.4 Imagination 5.5 Cogitative 5.6 Memory 6. The nature of reason and language 6.1 The active intellect 6.2 Abstraction 6.3 Intellectual habits 6.4 Practical reason

1. Introduction This is a course in epistemology, one of the philosophical disciplines that has drawn more attention since the end of the 18th century, and especially after Kant’s transcendental philosophy. Kant’s philosophical system—the so-called ‘critical philosophy’—is probably the best-known attempt to systematically explore the nature and limits of cognition, and the first to create an epistemological enterprise as such. Epistemology has become increasingly important ever since, growing in influence across disciplines that went in search for their own epistemological basis. Under the aegis of critical philosophy, the 19th and 20th century spawned a bewildering variety of epistemological views. In spite of this, it is not clear whether these views led to a more accurate and lasting picture of cognition. For instance, there is no basic agreement among contemporary Analytic philosophers about the best definition of knowledge; such a definition is still the object of major dispute. Instead we have wide-ranging epistemological theories that tend to portray knowledge very differently.

MASTERS OF ARTS IN PHILOSOPHY & ETHICS MAPE 8102 The Development of Thinking, Knowledge and Science Prof. Miguel Garcia-Valdecasas, PhD. University of Navarra, [email protected]

Contemporary epistemological theories are under the influence of Descartes and Kant in important respects. For one thing, Descartes’ emphasis on epistemic safety in the face of deceptive scenarios and Kant’s emphasis on the limits of knowledge are today incontrovertible tenets. Most theories place epistemic safety at the centre of epistemology, as well as the question whether the world can be known as it appears to be. While the context and the interest of current philosophers has gradually shifted, most philosophical theories are still attempting to solve problems that Descartes and Kant left unanswered. In that sense, today’s philosophy can be safely called post-Cartesian or post-Kantian. In contrast, ancients and medieval philosophers, imbued in different philosophical traditions, developed epistemologies that cannot be easily accommodated in a Cartesian or Kantian scheme. There are fundamental reasons for that. The distance between ancients and medievals and us is substantial, such that we often fail to appreciate the extent to which Cartesian representationalism or epistemic safety were secondary issues for them. Aware of this gap, I will attempt to build a theory of cognition that retraces the steps of the longstanding Aristotelian tradition and leaves aside the perspective of contemporary epistemologist. Accordingly, this course departs from mainstream Analytic epistemology and its focus on justification and the cognitive safety of beliefs, as well as from 20th century phenomenology. In my view, while phenomenology has devoted its efforts to explore the profound relation between subject and object in the cognitive act, it did not offer a systematic view of the sensory and rational capacities, lagging behind the Aristotelian tradition in this respect. As we will see, the Aristotelian tradition takes pain to examine the set of interconnected capacities that follow from sense-perception and culminate in reason. This course canvasses knowledge from the perspective of the Aristotelian tradition and its medieval successors. As known, the realistic Aristotelian tradition stems from Aristotle himself and from later Aristotelians. In this context, this course places the agenda back on ancient and medieval philosophers, resuscitating their understanding of cognition as a potency that is unquestionably apt for truth. To that extent, this theory can be called, rather generally, ‘realistic’, insofar as it does not emphasise the role of cognition over that of reality. While cognition is central to knowledge, it is not as central as being or esse, which, according to Aquinas provides a robust foundation of truth. Hence, in his view, truth is not originated primarily by mental states but by reality. The stress on being, which is in the external world, contrasts with Cartesian philosophy, which underwrites the role of cognition instead, placing the conscious subject at the centre of the epistemological enquiry. I am aware that, so portrayed, Aristotelian realism may be seen as another variety of externalism. Yet, as later explanations will show, Aristotle’s understanding of cognition as the nonphysical exercise of a formal capacity marks a point of departure from current externalism. In this course I undertake a certain expansion of this tradition, interpreting it in slightly different ways, but I only do so on the face of issues that were not genuinely dealt with. In my view, the Aristotelian tradition has gone further than any other tradition in articulating an inspiring view of cognition as a perfect, non-transient act (praxis teleia) and in describing an accurate array of cognitive faculties that follow the operation of the sense organs. There



2

MASTERS OF ARTS IN PHILOSOPHY & ETHICS MAPE 8102 The Development of Thinking, Knowledge and Science Prof. Miguel Garcia-Valdecasas, PhD. University of Navarra, [email protected]

is much that can be learnt today from its insights. I certainly do not know of any other tradition that has covered so much territory in epistemology, even though this territory remains uncharted to many of our contemporaries and may have few advocates today.

2. On philosophy As some readers may not be familiar with philosophy, let us say by way of introduction that philosophy is the pursuit of knowledge of the ultimate or transcendental causes of reality, that is, of causes that yield ultimate or transcendental explanations. As this definition might seem a bit ambitious at face value, it might be asked: but what do the words ‘ultimate’ and ‘transcendental’ mean in this context? To clarify their meaning, let us consider the following propositions: (a) Messi plays for FC Barcelona (b) Lions can’t climb up trees (c) Water evaporates (d) There must be some God (a) is the kind of knowledge that you pick up on a matatu without having to know who Messi is and what FC Barcelona stands for. People chat about Messi and FC Barcelona a bit recklessly. Thus, (a) is a piece of information that is both flimsy (for Messi could always change teams) and irrelevant to many people for whom European football is not an issue. (b) seems in turn a scientific proposition, that is, the kind of knowledge that natural sciences pursue. Yet on closer inspection, (b) is not a true scientific proposition. Its content describes a contingent and changeable fact that, in slightly different circumstances might become false without affecting the nature of lions. Lions will still be lions, that is, the kind of animals that belong to the feline family, if they could suddenly climb up trees. In fact, we will be terribly bothered about this change, because we do not normally think that science holds propositions like (b) as truly scientific, although they may be part of scientific accounts. (c) is indeed a true scientific proposition. The fact that water evaporates describes a scientific fact that cannot be changed without significant change to the laws of physics. For example, if water could not evaporate, clouds could not be formed, rain would stop, plants would not grow and animals would starve. Carefully considered, our planet would be quite a different place if water did not evaporate. Yet insofar as (c) describes a scientific fact, it does not describe a philosophical fact. For (c) is not what we call an ‘ultimate’ cause of reality. When we learn about water evaporation we only understand a limited fact about nature. Philosophy deals with questions of the kind of (d). The question about God is an ultimate question for various reasons. I will merely outline them here: you do not come across these questions very often; these questions cannot be easily answered without reflection; while (d) is certainly a scientific question, the method of the natural sciences is inadequate to give us understanding of this issue. They cannot solve it using their method. Finally, the answer to the question about God represents our ultimate attempt to furnish a complete account of reality. We somehow intuit that if we cannot provide a sound and lasting answer to questions of the kind of (d), we have failed in our attempt to explore the utmost capacities of reason.



3

MASTERS OF ARTS IN PHILOSOPHY & ETHICS MAPE 8102 The Development of Thinking, Knowledge and Science Prof. Miguel Garcia-Valdecasas, PhD. University of Navarra, [email protected]

Philosophy endeavours to explore the ultimate foundation of things. This foundation has historically been considered from different perspectives. One of them is the analysis of what might be called the “ultimate causes”. An ultimate cause is a cause for which there is no further explanatory cause to give; the identification of this cause entails hitting the bedrock of reality. Going further is not an option any more. The philosophical endeavour is not satisfied with the discovery of middle causes, that is, with the kind of phenomena that are usually the subject matter of natural sciences. Thus whether you believe it or not, philosophy is the last rational analysis and the most we can say about the world using our reason. Some people may say that standard philosophy is rather detached from ordinary experience. The average matatu driver and its passengers do not normally strike philosophical conversations on the road. While this appreciation is correct, it is a mistake to think that philosophy is detached from experience. If you do not reflect on your own experience, you cannot do any kind of philosophy, which works by taking stock of everyone’s experience. Experience is the kind of knowledge that the matatu driver can exhibit if he shows any serious interest in the functioning of his business. Without experience he will not be as competitive or savvy as other drivers. If philosophy dispenses with experience, it risks losing access to wisdom, which ancient philosophers deemed the ultimate cognitive virtue. Philosophy has been often regarded as ‘the love of wisdom’. This expression contains important intuitions about our ability to acquire knowledge of what is most valuable. Aristotle suggested in the first sentence of his Metaphysics that the human being has an inherent desire for knowledge. To say that philosophy looks for the foundation of things is tantamount to say that we would like to successfully deal with the ‘why-question’. Our desire for knowledge gravitates primarily on this question. Basically, to know is to know why, and in a slightly different sense it is also to know how. For example, you may wonder why people would like to build safe houses and do so if they can afford, but you could also wonder how to build a safe house. Albeit a reply to both questions, if true to facts, is knowledge, their answer is qualitatively different. Of these two, the why-question is the most crucial, and the one that inspires the philosophical enterprise.

3. What is knowledge? The word ‘knowledge’ is a straight translation of the Greek word episteme. The science of episteme is then the science of knowledge, or in other words, the theory of knowledge. Knowledge and how it is successfully acquired is then the central epistemological question. Many have pointed out that it is virtually impossible to find a working definition of knowledge, especially one that harnesses a clear consensus. My strategy will therefore be different. Rather than give a plausible definition, I will address knowledge by comparing it with the familiar concepts of ownership and possession. I will argue that to know things is to possess them in a very special way, one that invites first to reflect about the concept of possession. We all possess stuff; for example, we possess the trousers we wear. A tribal chief may possess 100 to 125 cows and be considered a wealthy man. Hence, let us compare the possession of cows with the possession of knowledge. We will look first at the possession of material goods of the kind of cows.



4

MASTERS OF ARTS IN PHILOSOPHY & ETHICS MAPE 8102 The Development of Thinking, Knowledge and Science Prof. Miguel Garcia-Valdecasas, PhD. University of Navarra, [email protected]

How is the kind of possession of cows of a tribal chief? I said that a wealthy tribal chief might possess up to 125 cows. The fact that he has a comfortable economic position means that he can dispose of some his cows at will; for example, he can sell some of them or give them to his daughter as dowry. His fortune may not change much after such a dispensation. But note that he cannot do everything that he wants with his cows. For instance, he cannot take them to India or mount and ride them as horses. His kind of possession has limits. Let us now turn our attention to eating. While eating is often associated with putting on weight, fasting is often associated with losing weight. To the extent that our body stores what is eaten and use it in different ways, food drives the internal transformation of our body for development and growth. In a similar way, learning involves a kind of transformation in its possessor through the acquisition of information. We are in very different mental states when we know and when we do not know. We might call this change of state a ‘cognitive’ change. Cognitive changes do not modify subjects physically, as does eating. As you might understand, while nothing affects the body of the person who learns to say ‘good morning’ in Swahili in important respects, her mind has certainly changed, for now she can claim to know the precise meaning of the expression ‘habari ya asubuhi’ (=‘good morning’). Physical changes always leave a physical footprint on the substance that is changed. Fire radically alters the structure of what is burnt, which is charred by combustion. If I want to know whether a piece of toast has burnt, all I need to do is to remove the piece of toast from the toaster and check it. But to know whether a little kid can correctly recite the alphabet it is no use to look at his head or examine his brain, because learning the alphabet is not a change comparable to burning, that is to say, to a physical change. According to some witness, L. Wittgenstein said once that if someone underwent a brain operation which made him able to speak Latin perfectly, we should not say that he had learned Latin on the operating table (J. Bennett, Kant's Analytic, p. 97). If this idea is actually Wittgenstein’s and what it says is true, we can make a good argument with it. The idea is very simple: no amount of physical change can give rise to knowledge by originating its characteristic mental states—assuming that such states exist and can be realistically identified. While mental sates might be physically affected by physical change, knowledge simply stays unaffected by it. Hence, while one could presumably learn Latin in several ways, one will have to do so in the usual way: in class, listening to Latin sentences or reading them—not on the operating table. As a result, a rogue neuroscientist could not tamper with one’s knowledge in the way in which she could presumably tamper with one’s brain states if given access to them. Regardless how hard it is attempted, knowledge is not manipulable by physical forces. A vile dictator who considers his country to be his property could, if untrammelled, take from you your cows, children and family. He could poison your water and burn your house, but he could never take away or remove your knowledge, and especially, your knowledge that the dictator’s rule is a travesty of justice. Hence, the fact that knowledge is intangible and inalterable makes it a highly valuable asset. And much more so, as we have already seen, than the possession of physical wealth. Consequently, knowledge is not a physical, but a cognitive transformation; its change is not external, but internal. Its acquisition should be probably likened to the possession of something that is intangible, that is, of something that fails to affect us physically.



5

MASTERS OF ARTS IN PHILOSOPHY & ETHICS MAPE 8102 The Development of Thinking, Knowledge and Science Prof. Miguel Garcia-Valdecasas, PhD. University of Navarra, [email protected]

Not every kind of cognitive transformation is valuable per se. Experience tells us that since not every kind of knowledge is equally relevant, we should not think that every piece of information is equally value for us. We could get to know ridiculous things such as who the shortest spy in the world is. Given that spies usually stay undetected, it is unlikely that anyone knows his or her real identity. For most people this piece of knowledge is worthless and utterly irrelevant. By contrast, consider human dignity, that is, the fact that all humans should be respected because they have an intrinsic worth. We consider this a basic principle of understanding of a human being. Regardless or independently of whether humans are black, yellow, white, young or old, soldiers or housekeepers, they all have equal rights and deserve equal consideration. We ought not fail to capture such a basic truth. Aristotle holds that by knowing the most valuable facts, we know other facts better. Understanding and knowledge pursued by their own sake are found most in the knowledge of that which is more knowable, for he who chooses to know for the sake of knowing will choose most readily that which is most truly knowledge, and such is the knowledge of that which is most knowable (…) for by reason of these and from this, all other things are known (Met I 2, 982a 30-982b 4). Aristotle argues that we know from the basis of what he calls ‘most knowable’ truths. Once you know a first principle, you usually come to know other truths that are intrinsically derivable from this principle. If true, this involves that knowledge has a tree-like structure. Tracing the trunk of this tree, we easily reach its furthest leafs. Thus, when we know the most basic realities, we come to know other naturally less knowable realities better. For instance, if you know that there is a physical force called universal gravitation that attracts bodies you know why coconuts fall and, ultimately, why the moon gravitates around the earth. For Aristotle, the person who chooses to know for the sake of knowing, rather than for other purposes will choose most readily that which is truly knowledge. Knowledge is one of those things that human beings seek in per se, that is, for its own sake. Per se things are things that are ‘loved for themselves’, rather than for the sake of any other thing to which such a thing may be instrumental. In contrast, instrumental things are things that are chosen for the sake of something else. One plainly instrumental activity is to drive a matatu. So are cooking and building a fence. They are done with some specific end in sight. However, per se activities are not instrumental. Among them we find pleasure, friendship, celebrating somebody’s birthday and praying. Surely, one might retort, some people might try to instrumentalise any of these things. What could be said to this? While it is hard to instrumentalise pleasure, it is easier to instrumentalise friendship, celebrations or prayer. For one thing, someone might want to make friends to gain political advantage over rival candidates to the Senate. Someone might celebrate somebody’s birthday in order to get a deal done at her celebration. Someone might want to pray to God not for the sake of God’s generosity but for fear. People might do any of these things with other possible ends in sight. Note, however, that the instrumentalisation of per se things is not a genuine experience of such things. People reject the instrumentalisation of friendship as a travesty of true friendship, understanding that this instrumentalisation is morally wrong. We should rather engage in friendship because we know that having friends is an activity that is loveable per se.



6

MASTERS OF ARTS IN PHILOSOPHY & ETHICS MAPE 8102 The Development of Thinking, Knowledge and Science Prof. Miguel Garcia-Valdecasas, PhD. University of Navarra, [email protected]

3.1 Knowledge as a perfect act I argued that whenever a subject gets to know something, this subject has changed in a non-physical way. Thus knowledge does not bring about physical changes as such (that is, qua knowledge) but qua activity that is embedded in the mental states of an embodied cognitive subject. Now we might wonder why knowledge happens to be in this way. To explain it, let us go back to the activities that I characterized as instrumental. Let us consider the case of a man that intends to build a fence around his property. Note that this activity is staged; it typically takes several steps to build a fence, such as: (1) Clearing the ground (2) Digging a long and wide furrow (3) Pitching upright posts at a regular distance from each other… until at stage (n), he finally has his fence in place. Aristotle notes that the beginning of physical activities like building a fence is characterised by the temporal incompatibility of stages. (1), namely, the beginning of this activity, is temporally incompatible with (n), namely, its end. To be doing (1) excludes being at the time for (n) and vice versa. When the subject starts to clear the ground he has not finished. By the time at which he finishes the fence, it is firmly in place. This implies he cannot now start it over again unless he destroys it. This is why the beginning and the end of physical activities cannot coexist in time. And so is the case with any two steps of this sequence: (1) and (2), (2) and (3) and (3) and (n). The incompatibility of stages leads Aristotle to argue that this kind of movement, which he calls kinesis, is imperfect. He calls the temporal end of this movement peras. Physical activities take time and their end is by no means certain or guaranteed. Such activities are characterised by the unpredictability of success; they may either succeed or fail, they may start and never be finished. Contrary to which we might desire, peras fails to stop fresh and new movement of the substance in a decisive way. Just as the subject has finished the fence, the fence starts a steady process of decay until it fades, rots and has to be repaired. At the beginning the fence decays in imperceptible ways. Then, as years come by, in a more visible way. The same happens with health. Recovering from a bad cold does not rule out catching a second cold in the near future, and many times the recovery of our health is not powerful enough to spare us from a second cold, or from any other future illnesses. Aristotle comments that ‘these processes are not actions, or at least perfect actions’ (Met. IX 6, 1048b 22-23). Consider now the case of knowledge. For Aristotle, knowledge is a perfect activity (praxis teleia), that is, an activity that is characterized by the possession of its end from its beginning. He argues that knowledge does not have peras, that is, an unstable end, but telos, that is, a stable and final end. In a contested passage he holds in a somewhat cryptic way that ‘to see’ is equal ‘to have seen’, ‘to think’ is equal ‘have thought’, ‘to understand’ is equal ‘to have understood’ (Met. IX 6, 1048b 33-35). He suggests that you cannot perceive a red spot without having seen it already. In other words, there is not any temporal transition between perceiving and seeing; the beginning and end of these activities coincide. This should imply that perfect activities cannot fail, or if they fail, their kind of failure requires

7

MASTERS OF ARTS IN PHILOSOPHY & ETHICS MAPE 8102 The Development of Thinking, Knowledge and Science Prof. Miguel Garcia-Valdecasas, PhD. University of Navarra, [email protected]

separate treatment. You do not know at which exact point in time your cognition starts and ends. If you shut your eyes, you may know when you opened them again. Yet the process of ‘opening your eyes’ is not equal, in Aristotle’s view, to ‘seeing red’. Cognition restricts itself to the act of seeing red. And you know that you do nothing specific in order to see if your eyes are open; you simply see and that is all. Thus, by seeing red you have actually seen red. If so, the present tense of the verb ‘to see’ nicely blends with its perfect tense in an activity that bears the mark of a kind of perfection that is relative to the activities which, like the building of a fence, are imperfect. Consider now understanding. Most of what we do to understand something is preparatory to the act of understanding. For example, closing the door to one’s room, read attentively and concentrate. These activities take time and are also kinesis in Aristotle’s sense. Yet understanding is quite different from them. Unlike closing a door, reading and concentrating, understanding does not gradually move from a rough initial status to a final and definite one. All we do to understand is simply preparatory to the act itself. Understanding is the act in which one says: ‘yes! I got it!’, or the so-called the aha moment that casts an unexpected light on nagging or unresolved issue. If this intuition is valid, as soon as we understand something we can say to have understood it. In a similar way, Aristotle writes that you are happy and you have been happy all at once (Met. IX 6, 1048b 26). You cannot point specifically at the fixed time spans at which you believe to have been happy as opposed to the times at which you were healthy or satisfied; happiness is an altogether different state from being healthy or satisfied, and this is why it should not have sharp time spans. If these intuitions can be valid, seeing red cannot be a staged activity comparable to the raising of a fence. The start and end of cognition is without qualification a same act. The cognitive act seizes this end, called telos, at the very beginning of the act without temporal incompatibility, in such a way that its end can be temporally coexistent with its beginning. Aristotle believes that he has struck gold with this appreciation and that he has captured something rather important to the nature of knowledge. I think that he has, and that this appreciation holds the key of a transcendental view of knowledge that prevents its naturalisation. Yet very unfortunately, he did not elaborate his views any further. The excellence of the cognitive act shows that knowledge is a capacity to bend the internal boundaries of time. Time affects our brain as we age, draining our memory and diminishing our inspiration. However, as time moves on it is not the capacity of seeing that fades, but its organ (the eye) because the organ and this capacity are not of the same nature. 3.2 Knowledge and belief The most relevant kind of knowledge is scientific. This, however, requires a caveat. Aristotle does not conceive of scientific knowledge in the way in which we see it today. For Aristotle, scientific issues are those whose answer reveals a necessary and permanent truth. Let us see exactly what we call a necessary truth. If a mosquito enters this room and, after a while it bites you, chances are that the same mosquito will not bite you again in a second foray. It follows from this that the mosquito chose you randomly. It did not choose you for a specific reason. However, it is known that mosquitos can detect infrared waves emitted by heat. The mosquito does not need to see you to find you in your room even if it is pitch dark in it,



8

MASTERS OF ARTS IN PHILOSOPHY & ETHICS MAPE 8102 The Development of Thinking, Knowledge and Science Prof. Miguel Garcia-Valdecasas, PhD. University of Navarra, [email protected]

because it has a specialized sense to detect any source of heat, and that source is you. Thus, if the mosquito bites you at night, this time we will not say that its bite was random. The fact that the mosquito can detect infrared waves as opposed to why chose you are different facts that normally give rise to different questions. While the first question is necessary, the second is not. Necessary questions are the most valuable questions. Their solution enriches our intellect. Necessary questions are characterized by their link to a necessary answer, that is, to the specific answer that explains why a fact that cannot in any other way. Surely, mosquitos could not have inbuilt infrared sensors, but if they lacked sensory organs they would probably be a different species with different features altogether. Scientific issues are also permanent; they are not open to change in the future, as is the cause with 2 + 3 = 5. We should draw then a distinction between knowledge and belief. In Aristotle’s view, knowledge is always about unchangeable, necessary facts, such as the fact that lions are the largest feline predators or the fact that 2 + 3 = 5. In contrast, belief is about changeable and contingent facts. The fact that beliefs are contingent gives them a subjective trait. They are always given when there is no definitive matter of fact. The solution to these facts is related to the most convenient or most appropriate solution in a practical case. The question whether the current president of Kenya is the right man for the job is intrinsically debatable. It may have a definite answer, but do not expect it. The answer to this question does not reveal a necessary truth. What we need to do as a family, as a nation, as a company, what we need to do now or in five minutes, is a contingent fact. On the other hand, the question whether there is some God has a definite answer (whether we succeed in identifying it or not) and is scientific. The truth of whether God exists cannot be a matter of belief or opinion. So, we have questions about which you are free to opine and questions about which you should not be. Maths and philosophy are one of those questions where opinions are helpless, because these questions have a final or ultimate answer. Your opinion cannot count and we should not pursue opinions about them. Note that scientific truths are eternal, unchangeable and discovered by the intellect, rather than invented or created by the mind.

4. Truth Knowledge is the result of the full integration of the cognitive act of a subject and some external truth in a single act. Truth involves the agreement between of mind a world for as long as the subject knows. Given that knowledge is a perfect activity, that is, praxis teleia, the connection between mind and world is not physical, nor the unpredictable result of sheer luck. What distinguishes knowledge is that it is a necessary and purposely guided activity, which is oriented to its end—the acquisition of truth. If there is no agreement between mind and world, there cannot be any knowledge. If somebody’s mind fails in her attempt to acquire some truth, we might say that knowledge simply slips out of her mind. But the mere existence of mistake and error does not justify the sceptical claim—without qualification— that the mind is not simply apt to truth, and that the availability of truth is so limited that we should be content if we only manage to apprehend partial, unstable and defeasible truths.



9

MASTERS OF ARTS IN PHILOSOPHY & ETHICS MAPE 8102 The Development of Thinking, Knowledge and Science Prof. Miguel Garcia-Valdecasas, PhD. University of Navarra, [email protected]

Generally speaking, we can state that knowledge (K) is equal to true knowledge (TK). Graphically represented, we can express this equation in this way: K = TK As a result of the formula, knowledge is only available in a single and unique variety: true knowledge. In other words, we do not have false knowledge. Let us see why. If someone tells me that the President of Kenya is in Strathmore University, and is right now greeting people at the entrance of the SBS building, we might become excited and go to the entrance expecting to be allowed to shake hands with him. But as we get to the entrance of the building it turns out that the President is not there and is not expected either. The truth is that I was cheated. Yet when I was told that the President was in Strathmore I believed it. And if I believe something false, can my psychological or mental state reflect any knowledge? The formula K = TK entails that active knowledge always captures specific properties of the world. In this context, false knowledge, when it comes in sight, is not an incongruous kind of knowledge; it is simply no knowledge whatsoever. Doubtless a false statement can be believed, giving rise to a certain mental state in the subject who believes it. But false beliefs do not capture any of the properties of the world—the ones that are sought after. To the extent that the false belief cannot satisfy the end of knowledge, which is truth, it simply fails in its attempt to disclose some truth—the reason for which one should not believe it. Therefore, the thoughts that I entertain when I believe that the President is here are not cognitive. This should not surprise us because not every mental state is cognitive—for example, while dreams and hallucinatory states are mental or psychological states, they are not cognitive. In the same way—and although not as deviant as dreams or hallucinations, which usually affect the accuracy of cognition—false beliefs are not cognitive either. Some may argue that false beliefs stem from recklessness, excitement or irresponsibility, and that one could be blamed for them. But this is not necessarily true. Psychological conditions like the ones mentioned above, and in some cases, the influence of stress, sleep deprivation and life’s reversals may lead an otherwise dutiful subject to embrace false beliefs. What entails that people should not always be blamed for what they believe, and ultimately, for what the kinds of things they say—we should show tolerance with error. The acquisition of truth requires patience and dedication. Before considering that we genuinely know, we should first take stock and find out whether others have come to understand better or in a more profound way what I seem to have unmistakably known. We can only demonstrate a handful of truths. Demonstrations are not easy to find outside mathematics, because there is not a consistent and undisputed concept o proof. Philosophers are very keen on questioning definitions, including that of evidence. This is why we should not expect that every scientific proposition, whether it is theological, geological, biological or legal, be deductively inferred from a more basic set of reliable premise-beliefs. Aristotle claims that it is challenging to know whether a certain claim derives or not from a reliable cognitive principle. Science is not built in the likeness of what we might call an “ideal science”: a deductive discipline. As a result, it is safe to say that we have fewer demonstrations than what is desirable, and that we have to learn to make do without them. At the end of the day, the limited number of demonstrations does not prevent the acquisition of knowledge that is scientifically valid and a source of inspiration to new discoveries.



10

MASTERS OF ARTS IN PHILOSOPHY & ETHICS MAPE 8102 The Development of Thinking, Knowledge and Science Prof. Miguel Garcia-Valdecasas, PhD. University of Navarra, [email protected]

Knowledge can be lost. If someone knocks me on the head hard enough I may lose consciousness and thereafter fail to know what I took for certain up to that moment. As perfect as a cognitive act may be for its being non-physical, the immateriality of knowledge does not means that cognition is exercised over and above the operation of organic faculties like imagination or memory. Thus, to note the fragile nature of knowledge and appreciate its limits is sound advice. As known Socrates famously held that awareness of the extent of one’s ignorance is the beginning of wisdom. We can now see why he was so correct.

5. Sense-perception Knowledge is fundamentally oriented to establish actual contact with reality and emerges when this contact is success. But the kind of contact between the cognitive subject and the world may change, giving rise to different kinds of cognitions—as many as the cognitive activities are. The intellect is not the only cognitive faculty that establishes cognitive contact with the outside world, which can be perceived at a deeper or more superficial level depending on the cognitive faculty. In epistemology we distinguish between lower and higher cognitive faculties, that is, faculties that grasp the soft or hard features of reality. These features may be either external, particular and unstable, or universal and more permanent. Epistemology normally starts with the analysis of the lower cognitive faculties, the ones that capture the soft features of reality, which are perceptual. Once we have gone through these, our focus progressively moves towards the faculties that touch on the hard features of reality. It has been traditionally argued that we have five senses: the sense of taste, the sense of touch, the sense of smell, the sense of hearing and the sense of seeing. We share these senses with many animals. Of course, our sense organs are not the only ones through which animals can sense. I mentioned the infrared sensors of mosquitos. It is known that bats fly without seeing, detecting obstacles by means of a specialised sense. All these senses are called external because they give the subject information about the outside world. There are other senses that yield information about the inside (our body), giving rise to corporal sensations of the kind of a toothache. While they acquire sensory information, they are not usually considered among the external senses. The most basic information that we have about the outside world is sensory. We gather this information through our sense of touch, the most basic of all senses. Aristotle regarded it as the most necessary for survival (De An. III 13). While other senses exist for the wellbeing of the animal, this sense seems in place to guarantee its survival (434b 23-25; 435b 18-21). It is involved in basic biological process such as sleeping, aging and dying, as well as in health and disease (Somn. Vig. 455b 12-b 2; De An. 435b 4-5; PA 648b 2-10). In some way, the sense of taste can be seen as an extension of the sense of touch, only that projected into one’s mouth. With it we can taste food; its taste is also a crucial discriminator of information that is relevant for survival. This does not entail that we have captured the most basic information of what is sensed. If cheese tastes salty and milky, through this sensation we come to know a fact about cheese, that is, its taste in our mouth. While this sensation shows what cheese tastes like, it does not show anything about the molecular composition of cheese or its process of fermentation. Its milky taste gives us no clue whether eating cheese



11

MASTERS OF ARTS IN PHILOSOPHY & ETHICS MAPE 8102 The Development of Thinking, Knowledge and Science Prof. Miguel Garcia-Valdecasas, PhD. University of Navarra, [email protected]

is healthy or unhealthy for a male adult. And cheese is not alone in hiding us this information. Healthy mushroom may taste as good as toxic mushroom. So we know very little of food through taste. Some people argue that the sense of smell is integrated into the sense of taste, so that tasting and smelling should be considered one and a single sense. This intuition, which may be valid, suggests that smelling a certain aroma is in a sense like tasting it. Organically, the cells that are responsible for tasting activate every time you smell, and conversely when you eat food, not only are you tasting food, we can say that you also smell it. In this way, good food does not only have to taste well, it must also smell well. Hence it is no coincidence that when you have the flu your nose gets stuck and you cannot properly taste things, a fact which again, points to the possible connection between tasting and smelling. Sensory information is fundamentally local. I can see you eating popcorn, but I cannot taste it as you eat it. I can only taste the popcorn that is in contact with my taste buds, which are the sensory cells on the upper surface of your mouth that detect flavours. Popcorn can only be tasted in an individual basis. I can see you; but by seeing you I cannot see who is your best friend. I can only see your best friend if you show me a photograph of him. Also, I cannot see China as it looks from Kenya. Even if you could produce a photograph of people in China, I could only see these people as represented in the photograph if it is within the range of my sight. So, perception, like some Google services, stays local. You can only perceive the part of the world that surrounds you, while you miss much sensory information that does not surround you right now. What is more, we could say that we even do not see colours; we see particular colours such as pink, yellow, sky blue, or purple. One way to parse the external senses is distance. Distance in sense perception helps us to discriminate the quality of every sense. Hearing and seeing, for example, do not to have to be very close to the external source of sound or colour. On account of this they are supposed to be the highest external senses. Hearing is a fine tuned organ. You can hear far sounds, and of course, close sounds. This sense is also central to human communication. We need it to listen and understand people. Hearing-impaired people do not know how our words sound and cannot usually reproduce them with accuracy. They also have often a hard time communicating with other people. Therefore, I would not be surprised if Hearingimpaired subjects had some kind of conceptual impoverishment on account of their impairment. Seeing is the highest of the external senses because it is by far the most sophisticated sense organ. I do not know of many diseases of the senses of touch, smell and taste, but we know about multiple diseases of the sense of sight such as short sightedness or myopia. The number of people who wear glasses shows it. As is known, the theory of evolution has met major difficulties in explaining how sight came to be from evolution through adaptation. The basis against the evolution of sight is this. This sense is so complex that it is often considered that eyes would have taken ages to develop into fully-fledged and fully functioning organs from a more primitive and now extinct kind of organ. The individual would have to allot prime organic resources that it badly needed for its own survival during the process of evolution that was immediately responsible for the development of the eye. In all likelihood then, if the theory of evolution is right as it is presented, sight capable species would have never come to have eyes (as you may imagine, this is not a intended as a refutation, but simply as an obstacle to Darwin’s account of evolution).

12

MASTERS OF ARTS IN PHILOSOPHY & ETHICS MAPE 8102 The Development of Thinking, Knowledge and Science Prof. Miguel Garcia-Valdecasas, PhD. University of Navarra, [email protected]

There is wide disagreement over how far can sight see, but lab tests indicate that in good conditions a subject can see a candle lit in pitch dark up to a distance of 27 kilometres. If this experiment can be brought to bear on the accuracy of other senses, our senses may be quite more capable and powerful than it has been thought. 5.1 The operation of the senses The senses receive information that matches the nature of their organ. When we know through the sense of smell, we know certain properties of the world which can be captured through it. We fail to know about any other real features. We hear sounds, but by hearing them we do not necessary understand what we hear. Hearing basically gives us knowledge of sounds. Again, the eye cashes in information that travels through light as colours and shades. But the fact that I am seeing a lion darting through the savannah does not necessarily mean that I understand what I see. Identifying a lion as a lion, the savannah as savannah, and the reason why the lion runs is not the job of the sense of sight or of any other external sense. A way to describe the activity of the senses is to say that they grasp forms. Beware that the word ‘form’ is philosophical jargon. A colour and a smell are a form. Typically, in the external world, forms create a single and unified structure with matter in what Aristotle calls the ‘hylomorphic composition’. We grasp perceptual forms by detaching them from their informed matter without any loss to its substance. In other words, the cognitive apprehension is not physical. This is why the perceived form can be discerned from the physical stimulation of the organ in question. Albeit the stimulation of an organ is necessary to see and may be the same for two different subjects, the perceived colour may not necessarily be same to every subject. There is a contingent relation between stimulation and perception such that the same stimulus may give rise to different perceptions in different individuals. The fact that this difference in perception may be produced by a salient difference in the composition of their respective organ does not change the nature of such a relation, which is still a contingent one. On account of this contingency, two people with the same organ may perceive the qualitative features of red differently, just as much as any other animal species might see red in grey. The difference in the qualitative perception of reality should not bother us, because this difference does not undermine perceptual accuracy. Animals will get an accurate representation of reality relative to the specific structure of their organ. Since the relation between the organ and its sensation is contingent, red merely enjoys a contingent existence, one that depends on the internal structure of these organs. Certainly, it can be hypothesised that if the human species would have developed a different eye to the one that it has, we might perceive red differently today; but we may never know. In any perception, there is always a physical story that can be told. If there is no physical stimulation of some organ there cannot be any perception. Red stimulates the sense of sight in the same way in which a gunshot stimulates the sense of hearing. For you to see red your eyes must be physically simulated by a specific wavelength, that is, the wavelength for which red objects are responsible. If some organ decays or corrupts, the quality of sensation significantly drops. Or again, if your organ completely degenerates as a result of chronic disease, the quality of the sensation drops altogether.



13

MASTERS OF ARTS IN PHILOSOPHY & ETHICS MAPE 8102 The Development of Thinking, Knowledge and Science Prof. Miguel Garcia-Valdecasas, PhD. University of Navarra, [email protected]

This is not to say that the stimulation of organs is the same thing as your sensation. One thing is the stimulation of your eye, and another the colour that you see. The red colour is more than a wavelength. The gunshot that you just heard is more than the gunshot. This difference encapsulates a key Aristotelian fact. For Aristotle, while stimulation and sensation are mutually dependent, they are not equivalent. I expressed it by saying that the nature of their relation is contingent. For on closer inspection there is nothing in the objective properties of sensory simulation that necessarily tells you what red is like. A so-called thought experiment famously devised by F. Jackson in his original article “What Mary didn’t know” has tried to show this (http://www.jstor.org/stable/2026143). I will describe his experiment now. Suppose that we put Mary in a dark room as soon as she is born, where she is kept totally isolated from any human contact. We select very carefully the kind of objects we want her to see. Everything in her room is black or white, and we only want her to see objects in those colours. Mary grows then without knowing about colours. Yet we are very keen in her learning physics. We tell Mary all that physics know about sense perception. We explain to her very carefully how the eye is made and functions, to the extent that she becomes an expert both in optics and the biological functions of the eyes. After all, Mary knows all that can be understood from physics and biology about seeing red. However, after so much learning, what does she know about red? Does she actually know everything that can be known about red? Or is she missing something? A very similar case would be that of teaching a blind subject about colours. In other words, how do you tell a blind man what pink is like? The case of Mary suggests that sensations cannot be mere physical stimuli. Her case suggests that while sensation counts as knowledge, physical stimulation cannot. Recall that we identified knowledge as a perfect non-physical activity. We argued that knowledge possesses its end from its very beginning. But at the same time, knowledge rests on the work of an imperfect activity, which is the physical stimulation of the organ. Let us now keep this relation in mind: Stimulus Sensation

Matter (informed) Form

While for Aristotle the sensation is a pure form, the stimulus is simply informed matter. He characterises sense perception as the act of sensing a real form without the matter involved in the stimulation of the organ. He writes: A sense is what has the power of receiving into itself the sensible forms of things without the matter, in the way in which a piece of wax takes on the impress of a signet ring without the iron or gold; but not qua bronze or gold: in a similar way the sense is affected by what is coloured or flavoured or sounding not insofar as it is what it is, but insofar as it is of such and such a sort (De An. II 12, 424a 18-23). In this passage, Aristotle depicts the possibility that a signet ring can impress its shape without the matter that makes up the ring. The signet ring stands here for the form of red, the object perceived. But in sensation, the matter of the ring is nowhere at hand. Although there



14

MASTERS OF ARTS IN PHILOSOPHY & ETHICS MAPE 8102 The Development of Thinking, Knowledge and Science Prof. Miguel Garcia-Valdecasas, PhD. University of Navarra, [email protected]

is a story to be told about the physics of sensation—the kind of story that we taught Mary in the dark room—our senses do not know anything about this story and, to the extent that most subjects are not keen physicists, they do not know about the physical story either. Thus Aristotle argues that the sensation of red or seeing red is actually the result of depriving all these things from their matter and retaining what such things have in common: the red colour. Any sensation, therefore, grasps a sensory quality of the external world without its underlying matter, that is, the chemistry of the physical stimulus. An external object causes the perception of red. In normal conditions, this perception is traceable to a specific red object in the outside world, e.g. a red jacket. But this perception does not delve deep into reality. The perception of the red of a jacket is not a sensation of the jacket qua jacket; the only specific feature that is captured from this jacket is its colour. You do not get anything in the sensation of what makes that jacket to be the particular jacket that it is, such as Janet’s jacket as opposed Jessica’s. While you may perceive the distinguishing features of Janet’s jacket, that is, those that unmistakably make this jacket to be hers, your eyes do not perceive these features as distinctive of Janet’s jacket. We will later see that the understanding of the distinctive or unique features of Janet’s jacket is not an object of perception, and it remains to be seen whether the intellect can look into such distinctive and unique features of her jacket unassisted by another sensory faculty. I said that seeing does not bring information other than the colour of a surface. And yet, it is also true that the senses cannot know or understand anything about colour as such. In this respect, the perceptual objects are always particular. You do not taste chocolate; you only taste the piece of chocolate that is in contact with your mouth buds. By tasting a particular chocolate bar, you only taste this chocolate bar. You may assume that other chocolate bars will largely taste like the one you taste, but you cannot taste them. The senses therefore sieve reality through their organs. They afford cognition of the properties of the outside world that stimulate our organs, side-tracking other possible properties that do not stimulate our organs despite present in the physical stimuli. Consequently, sensory information is necessarily partial and limited, being always in need of contextualisation by the perceptual subject to be correctly interpreted. At the bottom, we can say that sense perception is not a perception of reality qua reality but a perception of reality that stays relative to one’s senses. We have already stressed this point. Knowledge of the intrinsic features of reality cannot solely rely on sense perception, because by sieving information sense perception leaves out large portions of it. The subjectivity of sense perception is, hence, an invitation for us to examine other cognitive capacities that may compensate for the inherent limits of sense perception. 5.2 The internal senses The senses render cognitive information that is relative to the structure or composition of the sense organs, telling us so much about the world as about the nature of these organs. The limits of perception highlight its relativity, which can be attributed to the fact that the senses can only provide the kind of information that suits their internal makeup. Fortunately, this is not the end of the story. Cognition ensures that the relativity of sensations is not carried forward so as to make all knowledge subject-relative or inherently subjective. We assume that cognition endeavours to know reality as it is as opposed as to how it



15

MASTERS OF ARTS IN PHILOSOPHY & ETHICS MAPE 8102 The Development of Thinking, Knowledge and Science Prof. Miguel Garcia-Valdecasas, PhD. University of Navarra, [email protected]

appears to us. To overcome the relativity of sense perception, our cognitive apparatus looks for ways of taking the output of the external senses to a higher cognitive level, one that can systematically exploit the wealth content that went previously unheeded. Such content remains potentially present in the physical stimuli, where it is safely kept in store for retrieval, and it is up to cognition to devise a feasible way of making such content explicit. The external senses are called ‘external’ because they are in causal contact with the outside. The fact that they are physically stimulated shows it. After them enter the internal senses, which are called ‘internal’ because they do not have a direct contact with the external world and hence cannot be directly stimulated by it. The object of the internal senses, in fact, is the same object of the sensory organs—the perceptual qualities of the outside world, only that cast on a different light. The internal senses are hierarchically higher than the external senses. They compensate their lack of a direct causal contact with the external world with more comprehensive perceptual capacities. These capacities give the subject important advantages to cope with the world. For instance: the internal senses activate without the activity of the sense organs; this means that they can perceive any time regardless of the physical stimulation of the senses. Of course, the internal senses also require the stimulation of their own organs, but this has now become independent. Its organ is the brain, or some of its areas, and the brain is active even in restive state. This suggests that the internal senses are hierarchically higher than the external sense. The first of the internal senses is called the common sensorial. This sense is the most basic of them. Its job is to centralise the influx of sensations arriving from the external senses. In this way, the information grasped by every sense organ becomes the cognitive object of the common sensorial. From this point the information can travel to three more internal senses, the most powerful of which is the imagination, the internal sense that works more closely with reason. We also have memory and the estimative. The information that travels through the common sensorial and the imagination can then be perceived or analysed by memory and the estimative. It has been suggested that the cognitive object of every internal sense roughly covers a different tense. While imagination mainly focuses on the present, memory focuses on the past and the estimate on the future. The more complex an animal is—something that basically accounts for the complexity of the brain, the more internal faculties it exhibits, and the more these faculties expand and cooperate among themselves. While you should not expect an insect to have long-term memory, mammal as small as mice may have it. Memory is also a faculty that is key to active learning, something at which mice are good. Given the fact that the imagination deals with the present, by using the three faculties the animals retain a vivid picture of objects in the time arrow, rather than a still or motionless picture. 5.3 The common sensorial If you wake up in the morning only to realise that you cannot sense anything in your left hand, that is, that your hand has gone flat, how do you know this? Do you notice this thanks to your sense of touch? One thing is clear to you, and that is that something is awry with your left hand. You sense your lack of sensing; you are aware of it. You know that such awareness cannot be the rational conclusion of a logical argument that tells you that there must be something awry with your hand. Possibly, there could be a way to know this by

16

MASTERS OF ARTS IN PHILOSOPHY & ETHICS MAPE 8102 The Development of Thinking, Knowledge and Science Prof. Miguel Garcia-Valdecasas, PhD. University of Navarra, [email protected]

reason, but this is not they way to perceive it. Further, if your sense of touch is precisely the sense that is damaged, you can rule out that the very sense of touch let you perceive this damage. Hence, if you cannot perceive that our hand is insensitive by your sense of touch or by reason, how do you know it? We know it in virtue of the common sensorial. The common sensorial is also a faculty or cognitive capacity whose object is the knowing act of sense perception. When your sensory organs are functioning you sense that they are operating and healthy, getting in return a minimum amount of pleasure. The common sensorial realises thus all that is peculiar to every one of your senses, detecting the singularity of each in a larger kind of experience. In this way, you can tell the difference between the smell of roses and a knock on your door because there is an organ, which is the common sensorial, which detects what is specific to the object of every external sense. Thus the common sensorial integrates the external information of other senses. All the sensory information does not simply remain with the organ that captures it, but is carefully harnessed into a new and single object of experience that encapsulates information from many different organs. Cognition seeks to bring the output of the different senses to a unifying point. External and internal sensations are manifold, complex, multi-faceted and fragmented; despite this fragmentation sensations are experienced as seamless, continuous and unitary, in what W. James called “the stream of consciousness”. This continuity seems to mend the varied and contrasting nature of perceptual objects. In this way, the common sensorial unifies the output of the different senses making sure that their output does not overlap. In the absence of the this capacity to give unity to different and contrasting sensations, it is not hard to assume that the amount of information that the subject would receive at any point time would overwhelm and stun him, for at face value all the sensations seem to have very little to do with each other. But they do, and the common sensorial remedies it. 5.4 Imagination The imagination is probably the most powerful faculty of the internal senses. Some philosophers assume it to be even the most powerful cognitive faculty, and more so than reason. A. Kenny, for example, thinks that creative imagination, which is responsible for conjectures, hypotheses and the creative use of language, is superior to reason (The metaphysics of mind, 1989, p. 114). For his part, Heidegger believes that Kant’s transcendental imagination is so central to Kant’s system that it underpins transcendental conditions (C. Yates, The poetic imagination in Kant and Schelling, 2013, p. 34). As known, Kant calls ‘transcendence’ the capacity to overcome the inherent limits of experience. If Heidegger is correct, imagination is a building block of Kant’s philosophical system. The full development of imagination requires the biological development of the brain to a meaningful degree. Its biological development also entails the flexibility of the underlying neural circuitry, which needs to grow first for a number of years. Thus, neuronal plasticity ensures that the imagination can grow for a longer time than the sense organ of lower faculties like smelling. Imagination is also strongly associated with the subject’s IQ. Some philosophers have considered that an accomplished intelligence is usually the result of a powerful imagination. This organ allows humans to invent and create, conjuring up new ideas whose significance no one may have explored yet. Likewise, this is also a faculty that human beings share with animals. It is likely that many reptiles may have little to no

17

MASTERS OF ARTS IN PHILOSOPHY & ETHICS MAPE 8102 The Development of Thinking, Knowledge and Science Prof. Miguel Garcia-Valdecasas, PhD. University of Navarra, [email protected]

imagination at all, whereas the organ is central to most mammals, whose kind of ‘intelligence’ chiefly relies on this organ. When an animal is claimed to be smart, that is, to possess an array of resources to countenance specific needs and eschew danger without using brute force we say that the animal is imaginative. A. MacIntyre (Dependent Rational Animals, 1999, ch. 3) reports that dolphins have grown to develop different hunting strategies to respond to the location and speed of shoals with carefully driven pursuit strategies. Animals such as dolphins can do this thanks to their imagination. Imagination is the capacity to reproduce images that are no longer in contact with the senses. Our eyes need light and shades to be able to see. If I am now facing the SBS building entrance, my eyes will see what the entrance looks like, but if I lose contact with the entrance I will no longer see it. As argued, the eyes receive sensory information that stays in a direct causal contact with the outside world. They do not have any reproductive capacity of their own. In contrast, imagination, which has been characterised as a sort of repository (thesaurus) where images are stored for later use, reproduce images. It has play back abilities. Interestingly, the imagination not only stores internal images no longer in contact with the sense organs, it also creates images that are fully fictional. For example, your imagination can either represent the matatu accident that happened, and also, the many more matatu accidents that luckily did not happen. You can imagine these accidents with some quantity of detail: in different locations, at different speeds, with different people. By composing, rearranging and elaborating new objects, the imagination does not need to be ‘true to facts’, but simply true to the bits and pieces of these facts extracted from varied sensations. Dreaming, in particular, is uptime for this faculty. Note that while dreaming, reason deactivates and our imagination takes control of the subject’s mental life. Dreaming often comes down to some elaboration on phenomena that you saw, heard or touched throughout the day. You notice that some daily images have impressed on you. In dreams such images may be recursive, coming once and again to please or haunt you. As the succession of dreams is not the result of reason, stories do not need be logically consistent. We should accordingly rest assured, for most dreams do not make any sense at all. 5.5 Cogitative Suppose that a congoni has been cornered by a group of lionesses. The congoni can run fast enough, but this time its speed will be to no avail, for the group of lionesses have come quite close to it, and for all that the congoni can run, now it cannot find a way out. After being tripped by one of the lionesses, the congoni falls to the ground and is caught by its predators, which will not be merciful. This congoni was not a fool. A few minutes ago, it was lucid enough to detect impending danger, predict some of the hunting strategies of its predators, and come up with a feasible way to deceive them. The congoni knew that lions are one of the worst enemies of its species and that it should keep away from them. One way to know understand danger is reason. We understand that the lion is a predator because we are rational creatures. Neither lion nor congoni know this by reason. The congoni has nevertheless a way of knowing it, and this is the blind panic that it feels at the very sight of its predator. The congoni can tell from this sensation that anything that looks like, moves like and smells like a lion is a murderous beast and brews trouble. We say that the congoni instinctively knew it, and that when its situation became desperate, he felt a strong crave for shelter all at once.



18

MASTERS OF ARTS IN PHILOSOPHY & ETHICS MAPE 8102 The Development of Thinking, Knowledge and Science Prof. Miguel Garcia-Valdecasas, PhD. University of Navarra, [email protected]

After the unified experience of the common sensorial, most mammals can acquire high order information about their environment in content that can be still gleaned from the object of the external senses. In this guise, wildbeasts, zebras, congonis and impalas know by instinct that a lion is dangerous and should be avoided at all costs. The human being also has a comparable estimative faculty based on our instinct that produces similar information. Many times we instinctively acquire sort of information. The very sight of a room in flames next door is usually enough to make us run recklessly away from the flames. Neuroscientists explain the neuronal basis of unconscious behaviour by appeal to the so-called ‘low road’. Through an internal circuit that sends signals into the limbic system, that is, a specialised region of the brain, on the face of imminent danger we often noticing it. We may not know why, but our internal senses do, and they urge us run for good reason. This pre-reflective information is ingrained in our biological circuitry and can be attributed to the estimative. We receive constant inputs from the estimative, their quantity being probably larger than what one may initially expect. We instantly note that certain people or circumstances can be either good or bad for us. On reflection, we find out that in some cases our intuitions fail, but most often they do not. By the look of the SBS building, I acquire a first impression, still vague and undefined, of the quality of the courses that are taught in the University of Strathmore. By the look of an approaching policeman I know whether the policeman may demand a bribe or not. When we see somebody picking up a chocolate wrapping from the floor and placing it in a rubbish bin we instinctively think that this is a good person. We unconsciously derive this kind of information from our everyday perceptual experience without realising that it is information at all and that it often carves out our beliefs. The estimative (for animals) and the cogitative (for human beings) is an internal sense that deals with the future, and more specifically, with future events. The estimative is a projectoriented faculty; it assesses the current situation, and when the situation recommends or requires action, analyses or commands the best possible response to it. Its object or goal concerns the future insofar as the object of this sense is projected by our estimative out into the future. This future may not necessarily be far-off; in fact, often it is imminent, such as the crave for shelter of the congoni after spotting the shape of lioness at a distance. By craving for shelter the congoni has valued or tagged an experience using its estimative. Traditionally, it has been said that the cogitative assesses or evaluates situations in relation to oneself. Insofar as the cogitative is connected to the way I feel, its assessment is congenitally subjective. This does not imply that one’s assessment is necessarily selfish. In some cases, the ensuing action of the estimative cannot be called so. For example, the protective impulse of a mother to her baby is instinctive, and is not selfish, because it often brings with it some loss to her overall benefit. So, ‘subjective’ does not necessarily mean selfish. Emotions, of which the cogitative is the source, are subjective feelings to perceived or imagined phenomena. When we feel moved by some unexpected act of generosity, we unreflectively assess this act in light of our perception, which is inherently subjective. And if we reflect carefully, we will see how the salient features of most people’s personalities are directly attributable to the way in which they perceive and react to different situations. 5.6 Memory Memory is an internal sense that deals with the past. Typically, the imagination draws sensory images from the common sensorial, the faculty that is in direct contact with the



19

MASTERS OF ARTS IN PHILOSOPHY & ETHICS MAPE 8102 The Development of Thinking, Knowledge and Science Prof. Miguel Garcia-Valdecasas, PhD. University of Navarra, [email protected]

external senses. The imagination, however, has no evident capacity to store the sensory images that underwent change by the imagination or the sensory images that were emotionally tagged by the estimative. In such context, the imagination requests memory to store its own objects or to bring back images that the imagination fancied time ago. Memory honours such request by producing the requested image. Since the imagination often resorts to memory, we appreciate an intense inflow and outflow of information between the imagination and memory in order to exploit the varied dimensions of an internal image. Memory is also a capacity that lies in the brain. Science has known about memory impairment for a long time. If you damage the area where memory stores information cognitive impairment ensues. If I knock someone on the head strongly enough, she will lose her consciousness. In the worst case, when she comes back to herself she may be unable to remember the circumstances in which she was knocked, her name and current age. She may even be incapable of speech. When this happens, we say that she lost her memory. Our memory keeps plenty of information about us. Memory keeps people’s name as our imagination represents it, but it also keeps track of the emotions that a certain name arose in our cogitative. As known, the recollection of some names may be associated with good and joyful experiences. Of course, if the subject cannot recollect these names, she will also fail to experience the emotions that the recollection of such names could have aroused, as it typically occurs in déjà vu moments. You may think that your memory is perfect, but as the passage of time often shows us, it is not, for memory grows or recedes in accord with its use. You could then say that subjects often get the kind memory that they train. There are two relevant features about memory: If we experienced a certain strong feeling at certain event some time ago, it is very likely that you can accurately remember this event. For example, not many people know what they were doing last year on this day and at this exact time. We need a very good memory to be able to remember this. Many people that experienced the attack on the twin towers in the US, though, remember where they were exactly on 11 September 2001, the day the twin towers were attacked, what they were doing and what kind of emotions it aroused in them. Strong feelings consolidate memory. Another thing that consolidates memory is age. Most likely, you will always recollect the events that you can recollect from your childhood. Memories from the distant past may not be many, but if you can remember them you will probably never forget these memories. The flexibility of the brain at an early age helps to consolidate memories. Childhood memories or long-term memories usually stay fixed in our mind, whereas short-term memories are often transitory and tend to be forgotten.

6. The nature of reason and language Ancient cavemen used to draw pictures of their environment on the walls of caves. Specifically, they drew animals, that is, their closest companions in wildlife. The existence of these drawings demonstrates that ancient cavemen had a vivid interest in animals from very early on and may have known a good deal about them. Of course, today we know significantly more about animals than they. Yet for all that we know, there are facts that



20

MASTERS OF ARTS IN PHILOSOPHY & ETHICS MAPE 8102 The Development of Thinking, Knowledge and Science Prof. Miguel Garcia-Valdecasas, PhD. University of Navarra, [email protected]

simply escape our best understanding. No one knows the standing number of animal species. Scientists have described over 1.5 million species worldwide, of which the vast majority are insects. Every year 10,000 animal species or so are found and catalogued. Projection of the possible total number of species is not very accurate either, since this projection ranges from 2 to 50 million. Interestingly, most animal species share most of their capacities with a large proportion of species. For instance, most animal species grow and reproduce. Some other specialised capacities that are species-specific like hunting or making burrows may be less frequent, but there is still a considerable number of animals that hunt or make burrows. In contrast, we may wonder how many species share rationality with us. Considering the animal kingdom as a whole, how many animal species are ration? Only our own! Aristotle defined man as a rational animal (‘zoon logikon’ in the original Greek). Always a keen natural observer, he also noted that man is the only species that has ‘logos’ (a Greek term that means ‘word’), that is, that has speech and communicates using concepts (Pol. I 1253a 10-11). He claimed that reason is such a perfect capacity that it seems ‘some sort of independent substance’ (De An. I 4, 408b 18-19) that has a divine origin (De An. I 4, 408b 29). Aristotle assumes thus that nature cannot have furnished reason as a peculiar biological trait of some group of mammals. In his view, to the extent that reason cannot suffer decay or corruption (De An. II 2, 413b 25-27), it cannot be a biological feature either. If Aristotle is correct and reason has a non-biological origin, this faculty cannot have biologically evolved from more primitive forms of life; in other words, reason cannot be biologically inherited because it has no origin in our genes. In arguing that reason was divine, unchangeable and incorruptible, Aristotle sidetracked other possible origins of reason. This is interesting. Darwin’s theory e.g. stresses that animals have evolved into their current shape from other less adaptive and extinct life forms. Such an appreciation is vastly supported by archaeological records and should not be questioned. The theory of evolution lends support to the view that reason might have arisen at some undetected point in the evolutionary line as a biological feature. We know, for example, of certain changes in our genes that buttressed the kind of abilities that are associated with rationality such as bipedalism, the dexterity of human hands, the development of weaker jaws, or sociability (see http://www.bbc.com/earth/bespoke/story/20150311-the-15-tweaks-that-made-ushuman/index.html). The list of features will definitely grow as we understand evolution better. Despite mounting evidence that humans evolved—an unsuspected fact in Aristotle’s times— his point about reason may still be valid: rationality does not stem from molecules, cells and more primitive life forms, and scientific investigation into these forms will not reveal the origins of reason. As a result, reason could not be said to have spontaneously risen either randomly or from adaptive pressures. Aristotle’s claim seems in line with the opinion of some of the most influential developmental psychologists who, like M. Tomasello, claim that genetic variation and natural selection are insufficient to explain our characteristic cognitive skills. For Tomasello from 6 million years ago—the estimated origin of our species—to the present: (…) there simply has not been enough time for normal processes of biological evolution involving genetic variation and natural selection to have created, one by



21

MASTERS OF ARTS IN PHILOSOPHY & ETHICS MAPE 8102 The Development of Thinking, Knowledge and Science Prof. Miguel Garcia-Valdecasas, PhD. University of Navarra, [email protected]

one, each of the cognitive skills necessary for human beings to invent and maintain complex tool-use industries and technologies, complex forms of symbolic communication and representation, and complex social organizations and institutions. And the puzzle is only magnified if we take seriously current research in palaeoanthropology (M. Tomasello, The cultural origins of human cognition, 1999, p. 2). The same rationale has been articulated from other perspectives. Considering how evolution operates in itself, it has been suggested that its development may not have run along rationality, because evolution is only concerned with the fitness of our genes, rather than with the accuracy or depth of one’s beliefs, with which evolution is not concerned (Stanovich, K. E., “On the Distinction Between Rationality and Intelligence: Implications for Understanding Individual Differences in Reasoning”, in Holyoak, K. J., Morrison, R. G., The Oxford Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning, 2012, DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199734689.013.0022). Aware of it, and most likely uncertain about its most probable origin, Aristotle claimed that the intellect has a divine origin. The mounting evidence that evolution per se cannot explain the rise of rationality adds to the incontrovertible fact that reason is an elusive faculty. Aristotle reckons the considerable difficulty of exploring the depths of the human spirit. To this extent he wrote: ‘to attain any knowledge about the soul is one of the most difficult things in the world’ (De An. I 1). If this is true, no matter how powerful reason may be, we will never comprehend it to a satisfactory extent. Still, we do not feel guilty for its limits, because epistemology is one of those activities that are per se lovable and hence should lead to happiness. Compared with sense perception, rationality strikes us as a complex, ramified and highly sophisticated capacity. Rather than a single and straightforward capacity, reason is a capacity of capacities, a capacity that hosts many other rational capacities. A telling feature of intellectual achievements is unpredictability. It is almost impossible to predict the major achievements of human rationality in the coming years. In general, it may have been sensible to expect early humans to have crafted defensive weapons, no matter how rudimentary, but it would have been hard to predict that humans in the 21st Century would explore Mars with autonomous spacecraft. Likewise, before Einstein it would have been hard to believe that time is not an absolute physical magnitude and that it is relative to the observer, because this claim would have clashed against prevailing assumptions in physics. Yet the relativity of time is today a basic and undisputed truth. Reason is not a single capacity, but a capacity of capacities (A. Kenny). See how. By learning a language, you also acquire the ability to learn Chinese. By learning Chinese, you can make business in China, and by so doing you can become wealthy. Accordingly, education inspires wealth. Surely, you might become wealthy by luck, but this is not ordinarily the case, for there is a correlation between wealth and education. Likewise, reason yields self-knowledge. Note that animals know very little about themselves. For example, they do not know what makes them animals of a certain species (recognising other animals as belonging to their species is not the answer). Humans know what characterises them because they know themselves to unprecedented limits in the animal kingdom.



22

MASTERS OF ARTS IN PHILOSOPHY & ETHICS MAPE 8102 The Development of Thinking, Knowledge and Science Prof. Miguel Garcia-Valdecasas, PhD. University of Navarra, [email protected]

On the front of the Greek temple of Delphos it was written ‘know thyself’, that is, ‘know yourself’. History tells us that humanity consistently pursued self-knowledge, arriving at sciences like philosophy or arts like poetry in order to unearth the deep secrets of its nature. I propose discuss reason by looking at one of its more familiar instrument: language. Can animals really be said to have a language? I will address this issue by reflecting on a quote from L. Wittgenstein, an Austrian-born 20th Century philosopher. He wrote: ‘if a lion could speak, we could not understand him’ (PI, p. 223). Suppose that when visiting a city zoo, a lion says: ‘Life is quite unfair. Why am I behind bars?’ No doubt if you were to witness this you would be rather stunned. Philosophers suggested various ways in which this revelation will not take place and why lions will remain non-language competent for a long time. One of these reasons is that, as human language uses concepts, and concepts give meaning to words, you cannot be a competent speaker without having first gone through some process of concepts acquisition. The criterion for a language is grounded in other rule-following activities such as learning, mastering certain techniques and grasping possible criteria of correctness. To grasp concepts, an animal would have to understand the normative practices that underlie the process of language acquisition. Certainly, animals grasp reality through their external and internal senses, as a consequence of which a lion in captivity can feel sad and depressed. But to apprehend what captivity involves, meditate about the unexciting prospect of life behind bars and articulate them exceeds the capacity of lions. Wittgenstein is correct in denying linguistic capacities to animals, and so are influential linguists like N. Chomsky, who argues that “human language appears to be a unique phenomenon, without significant analogue in the animal world”. This is not to say that an animal lacks any intelligence. They do not. As a caveat, I will distinguish between ‘reason’, which a specific human capacity, and ‘intelligence’, which may be not and thus be found in animals. It is crucial to see intelligence as a broadly distributed ability that may be possessed in several degrees. In certain definitions of ‘intelligence’ higher animals will undeniably qualify as intelligent. This is the case, for instance, with teleological definitions of intelligence. In these definitions, to be intelligent is the capacity to pursue Y by means of X. Accordingly, intelligent creatures know that by pursuing X they will obtain Y and pursue Y willingly. Animals show great ability in pursuing Y (their goals) through X, doing so intelligently. They choose the successful means that secure their intended goals and take specific measures to maximise success over failure. It is hard to say that this is not intelligent behaviour. But animals are not alone in behaving intelligently. Non-living creatures like computers also get to the point of selecting the means that result in an end, doing in faster times and with a lower energy consumption than both animals and humans. Besides, computers make certain that no detail of their job is left undone. Thus, everything indicates that computers may be called intelligent inasmuch as they follow behavioural patterns of animals and humans. But there is a limit to their intelligence, as we will now see. For one thing, computers cannot be said to know about either means or ends. They lack the mental states characteristic of higher animals and human beings. Besides pursuing ends without knowing, ends can systematically be pursued for no specific reason. This is the case of animals, which pursue ends but cannot produce reasons for their pursuit. Animals show no skill in justifying their actions, and, obviously, we do not pretend that they can justify them. Their pursuit of goals is guided by desires and instincts rather than by reasons. In contrast, humans have a reason both to pursue X (that reason being Y) and a reason to

23

MASTERS OF ARTS IN PHILOSOPHY & ETHICS MAPE 8102 The Development of Thinking, Knowledge and Science Prof. Miguel Garcia-Valdecasas, PhD. University of Navarra, [email protected]

pursue Y (this reason varies). In fact, we think that the indication of reasons is what best characterises our behaviour. When we do not claim the reason to do X, people may think that our action is irrational, and that we should have thought it twice. For good or bad, our species is the only animal species that uses a language. This indicates that we are the only rational species, and that if we want to find more about reason, we must face this pursuit by squeezing rational capacities to their limit. 6.1 The active intellect Aristotle holds that if reason is not a natural or biological faculty of the kind of sight. Certainly, his view of reason is not the only one that is available in the philosophical arena. Some contemporary philosophers claim that reason is a biological feature whose roots can be traced back to less conspicuous life forms. But if Aristotle’s intuition is correct and reason is not a natural capacity of the kind of sight, it is sensible to regard reason as incorporeal, or what is the same, inorganic. Aristotle presents this point in unambiguous terms: The part of the soul, then, called intellect (…) is actually none of existing things before it thinks. Hence too, it is reasonable that it should not be mixed with the body; for in that case it would come to be of a certain kind, either cold or hot, or it would even have a organ like the faculty of perception; but as things are it has none (De An. III 4, 429a 21-27). Let us explore some of the consequences of the intellect’s incorporeity. In the same way in which we can say that we walk with our feet, breathe with our lungs or digest food with our stomach, we should not say that we think with our brain. The brain is not the instrument for thinking much as our feet are the instrument for standing, walking or jumping. Aristotle states clearly that thinking lacks bodily organ. The brain—or in Aristotle’s view the organ that plays the role of the brain, which is the heart—limits its job to provide organic support to the external and the internal senses as an organ. Historically, philosophers like Kant or Hegel held that thinking is a transcendent capacity, that is, a capacity that sits above the limits of subjective experience. Other philosophers held similar views. For one thing, Aquinas argued that reason is neither corporal nor operates through the body (S. Th. I, a. 75, 2 c). Yet the incorporeity of reason is not self-evident. We perceive more clearly our corporeity. And several clues point to the fact that thinking could not be exercised in a bodiless state. To start with, thinking can only operate if there is an active and fully functional brain. We might then articulate the thesis that thinking is a coupled system, namely, a system coupled with the neural circuitry of the internal and the external senses, all of which have their ultimate organ in the brain. The claim that reason is incorporeal cannot circumvent such a fact. To give an accurate account of this situation, some philosophers in the Aristotelian tradition argued that the brain is a necessary, rather than a sufficient condition for thinking. The bare possession of a brain does not guarantee thinking. Two facts show it; first, many animals with a large brain like whales or elephants do not think rationally; secondly, the exercise of thought, which includes the ability to do square roots, to understand the theory of special relativity and the concept of evil vastly exceeds the biological functions of the brain. Here is the basic Aristotelian intuition that grounds the exceptionality of thinking. Following Aristotle, philosophers in the Aristotelian tradition considered that the intellect is a ‘tabula rasa’ (Latin) at birth, that is, a blank slate.



24

MASTERS OF ARTS IN PHILOSOPHY & ETHICS MAPE 8102 The Development of Thinking, Knowledge and Science Prof. Miguel Garcia-Valdecasas, PhD. University of Navarra, [email protected]

What [the intellect] thinks must be in it just as characters may be said to be on a writing tablet on which as yet nothing actually stands written (De An. III 4, 429b 31430a 2). Aristotle explains that reason does not come with pre-existing notions of any kind, thus resembling a blank slate ‘on which nothing actually stands written’. Prior to the full activity of reason, the sensory faculties must grow and develop together with the neural circuitry years in advance. Authors have usually referred to the age of reason as the time in which a child becomes fully aware and responsible. In other words, children start thinking at a certain age before which a forming neuronal network will let them play with their sensations1. Because the intellect initially resembles a ‘tabula rasa’, Aristotle suggested the existence of what he called an active intellect as opposed to a passive intellect. He writes: There is an intellect which is of this kind by becoming all things, and there is another which is so by producing all things, as a kind of disposition, like light, does; for in a way light too makes colours which are potential into actual colours. And this intellect is distinct, unaffected, and unmixed, being in essence activity (De An. III 5, 430a 1417). Commentators have often pointed out that this distinction is obscure and very short of detail. Aquinas, nevertheless, built an inspiring account upon it. The intellect that ‘produces’ all things is the active intellect. This production can be interpreted in different ways, in none of them physical. In one of them, the active intellect is the part of the intellect that adapts the forms of sensory images—or forms, as I earlier called them—into forms that are speak the same language of the intellect. Remember that the senses produce information about the real world that is relative to the makeup of the organ; as a result, the red colour tells reveals worldly properties that are relative to the human eye. For this reason, the senses collect information that stays physical, that is, highly reliant on the internal structure of the sense organs. In contrast, Aristotle holds that the intellect is ‘unaffected’ and ‘unmixed’. Therefore, the intellect’s nature contrasts with the nature of the senses. It is natural then to assume that the intellect cannot make sense of any information that has gone through the senses. In its current shape, sensory information is not ready; its contrast with the intellect is high. The intellect is an objective capacity that aims to capture reality as it is, not as it is represented. This is a crucial claim to understand the role of the active intellect. The intellect trumps the relativity of sense perception by casting a different light on it. If the intellect cannot do this, it will never understand the world as it really is. Note that the senses give us a picture of the world that is relative to their organs. We know that their output is generally reliable but incomplete. In the current state of affairs, the intellect cannot operate. Aquinas argues that the intellect ‘cannot primarily and directly know the particular and material things’ 1

Once the sensory apparatus activates, the intellect will naturally start. If this hypothesis is true, the embryos that have been frozen and are kept in a test-tube cannot think even if, as members of the human family, they have a reason. Doubtless a human embryo has a capacity to think as much as an inherent capacity to become an adult male or female, but the embryo cannot think because it has not developed the neural circuitry that necessarily underlies the development of the external and internal senses. The capacity is in place but the embryo cannot realise it.





25

MASTERS OF ARTS IN PHILOSOPHY & ETHICS MAPE 8102 The Development of Thinking, Knowledge and Science Prof. Miguel Garcia-Valdecasas, PhD. University of Navarra, [email protected]

(S.Th. I, q. 86, a. 1) that are the output of perception. For that, the active intellect performs the phenomenal task of translating sensations into a language that the intellect can understand—the use ‘translating’ and ‘language’ being here metaphorical. The active intellect is a capacity that removes the material condition of sensory objects, carefully turning sensitive forms into intelligible forms, that is, forms that are purely formal, potentially objective, and universal. With this, thinking makes its true entrance into cognition. Computers rightly illustrate the job of the active intellect, providing us with a helpful metaphor. As users, we often suffer incompatibilities between disparate software platforms, that is to say, between mutually incompatible software applications. Computers cannot often share valuable information because of this. This is typically no big deal, because this problem can be often worked around with some application that translates the kind of information that suits one device into the kind of information that suits the other. In the absence of the active intellect, we would see a compatibility issue between the senses and the intellect, one that could prevent the intellect to gain access to sensory forms. Aristotle compares the active intellect to a beacon light that is always on, night and day, hour after hour, year after year, ‘being in essence activity’ (De An. III 5, 430a 17). It is an activity that does not go on and off, but stays always active on account of its perfection. The reason why the active intellect may be hard to notice to any subject is twofold. Firstly, part of our awareness is biological. One cannot consistently keep one’s attention focused on what one wants for lack of command of one’s attention. Secondly, Aquinas follows Aristotle in holding that most intellectual activity concerns the passive intellect, which operates once that active intellect has done its job. The passive intellect owes its light to the active intellect. Just as it is really hard to look at the source of light and be able to discern anything, it is very hard to get any direct experience from one’s active intellect. When thinking—we may suggest— one’s attention primarily focuses on the object of understanding, rather than on the background luminosity that renders intellectual objects perceptible. For example, if you think that today is going to rain, your thinking focuses on rain, not on how you think it. The active intellect operates in the background for good reason. When I am conscious I realise that I am thinking; I also notice that I am consciously thinking it—it is plain to me. But this realisation captures the work of my passive intellect in action. This intellect is responsible for what I am thinking right now, when thinking e.g. that ‘snow is white’ or ‘the sky is blue’. While thinking about the properties of the snow and the sky, my active intellect is always creating a luminosity threshold for the judgements or reasonings of the passive intellect. Such luminosity thresholds can also be said to pave every consecutive step of the passive intellect towards more lucid apprehensions. The active intellect is active even when the subject is out of consciousness, may have never been conscious or will never be. The active intellect does not run out of steam, if Aristotle is correct, because it is ‘in essence, [or fundamentally] activity’. 6.2 Abstraction Abstraction is the first act of the intellect in general and of the passive intellect in particular. To abstract means to remove all possible matter from the object of abstraction. This object has been up to now with the internal senses. When abstracted, this object is no longer sensitive but rational, as shown.



26

MASTERS OF ARTS IN PHILOSOPHY & ETHICS MAPE 8102 The Development of Thinking, Knowledge and Science Prof. Miguel Garcia-Valdecasas, PhD. University of Navarra, [email protected]

The result of abstraction is a concept. We make an ample use of concepts. Lion, water, bus and planet are concepts. Let us take the concept of water. Water is concept with manifold dimensions. Its complex structure is clearly indicated by the fact that while we all agree on the meaning of the concept of water, we have a slightly different understanding of its content. Not all of us understand water exactly in the same way; for example, our concept of water may be significantly poorer than the concept of water of an earth scientist. This does not prevent us from having a same concept of water. It is important to note that although concepts are universal, they differently grasped by different individuals. This means that the concept of water equally applies to a kind or set of cases in which they experienced water, with respect to which the concept holds a relation of identity. All the cases water must be identifiable in kind with the concept itself. This is why when we see water, we say ‘water’, or ‘mai’ in Kikuyu language. I will explain this in a minute. The universality of concepts is also at odds with subjectivity, which is to say, with the subject-relativity of sense perception. The universality of concepts amounts to this. In practice, every instance of water, no matter its condition (liquid, solid or gaseous) or its place (raindrop, water-in-a-lake or in-a-glass) is the same kind of substance across the board. Water in a puddle, in a lake, in large or small quantity, frozen or evaporated and later disseminated in the air becomes the same kind of substance for the intellect. Its possible external appearance does not matter much to our grasp, nor does physical distance. The intellect unearths a relation of identity between every conceivable kind of water, because all possible kinds become identical in the concept. The water that can be spotted in a swamp is the same water that we might find in an outer planet. We perceive water in such a way thanks to abstraction, that is, to the removal of the particular features of water that characterise sense perception. By contrast, animals conceive every perceptible instance of water as being fully independent and separable from any other. For them, water-in-a-puddle is a wholly independent item from water-in-a-lake, receiving separate treatment and being the result of a separate apprehension. W. Kohler (1887-1967) was an experimental psychologist who spent the First World War in the Canary Islands. Famous for his experiments with chimpanzees, he devised several of them to test chimpanzees’ capacities. It has often been pointed out that monkeys are not quick learners. It can take a thousand trials to train a monkey to perform a rather simple cognitive task that a human being can learn to perform in a minute or less. Experiments require meticulous preparation, intelligence and careful interpretation of the results. In this case, a chimp was trained to use the water of a pot to quench fire encircling its reward (bananas). When the chimp was familiar with this exercise, Kohler built a raft, placed the same pot on the raft and the fire in a small island. Then the raft was gently pushed to the island. When the chimp arrived, it unsuccessfully tried to pour water onto the fire to the reward. After repeated attempts, the chimp found itself unable to put out the circle of fire and of gaining access to the reward because this time the pot did not contain any water in it. It did not dawn in it that the raft on which it travelled was sitting on a large and continuous mass of water. This experiment indicates that the mind of the chimpanzee is not powerful enough to abstract, and consequently, to arrive at the possession of concepts such as the concept of water. The chimpanzee guessed that only the object that can quench fire is the water that is in the pot that is by it. The chimp does not know anything about other kinds or instances of water. The point here is not that the chimpanzee is a fool and did not try hard enough. The

27

MASTERS OF ARTS IN PHILOSOPHY & ETHICS MAPE 8102 The Development of Thinking, Knowledge and Science Prof. Miguel Garcia-Valdecasas, PhD. University of Navarra, [email protected]

chimpanzee would have taken the reward if it knew how. The issue is that the animal cannot conceive the water-in-a-pot as identical with any other instance of water. It rather assumes that the water-in-a-pot is different in kind of the water-in-a-lake; what is more, there is no such relation for the chimp, both substances becoming independent from each other. This is basically the result of using the senses to assess the nature of the substance that humans call 'water'. The rationale for denying chimpanzees abstraction is this. Sensory information varies in colour, size, shape, composition and quality. If chimpanzees cannot integrate information that looks very different to our senses into a single and unifying cognitive object, which is essentially a concept, they fail to grasp concepts. To use concepts, the chimpanzee would have first to grasp them, that is, starting with de-materialising images or sensations so as to build identity relations between objects that bear almost no resemblance between them. Note that for any language user the specific matter of water becomes irrelevant to the definition of its concept, because the language user assumes that water can be in various states without change to its essential properties. The acquisition of concepts has pros and cons: among the pros, the core of reality, that is, that which philosophers call the essence of a substance is now in our hands. Essences are accessible to reason as de-materialised objects. Among the cons militates this. In the external world matter is a fundamental property. By abstracting it or removing it we give up such a property, and it is now unclear how the subject can get it back. As you may notice, fire burns, but the concept of fire does not burn your head. You contemplate the devastating effects of fire on dry leafs, but you do not experience fire in your head while you contemplate it. This entails that the concept of fire, and indeed any other concept, is missing something central to actual fire. We universalize concepts at some cost, namely, at the cost of losing out to their matter. Thus, as knowledge proceeds further intellectual operations will have to cope with it. 6.3 Intellectual habits In section 6.1 I explored Aristotle’s distinction between the active and the passive intellect. I said that the active intellect resembles a beacon light that is always on, whereas the passive intellect is on and off, and profits from the luminosity threshold created by the active intellect to perform what might be called the first intellectual operation: abstraction. I also argued that self-knowledge usually renders cognition of the passive intellect. But we might wonder: why do we know our passive intellect better? This is a nagging question and its answer will certainly spur further questions on self-knowledge. Its answer touches the heart of Aristotle’s epistemology. Unfortunately, Aristotle did not address it. Therefore we might give it some consideration. At the level of the sense organs, there is not such thing as a full reflectivity. Sensory faculties can only know themselves, that is, what they do, thanks to other perceptual faculties, and always in a limited way. For instance, I argued that the common sensorial can perceive the normal functioning of the external senses, but the way in which the common sensorial grasps this functioning does not render a full view of them. Reason shares of the inherent limits of self-perception. Reason seems more self-reflective, but the degrees of self-reflection are different in the active and the passive intellect. To start with, there is no direct cognition of one’s intellect. Aquinas points out that the intellect can only know itself indirectly: ‘as a result of apprehending other things, it comes to a cognition

28

MASTERS OF ARTS IN PHILOSOPHY & ETHICS MAPE 8102 The Development of Thinking, Knowledge and Science Prof. Miguel Garcia-Valdecasas, PhD. University of Navarra, [email protected]

of itself’ (QDV q. 10, 8 c.). Thus, we grasp our intellect inasmuch as it is or has been in act. This suggests that the passive intellect is more knowable than the active intellect; every time we think it stays visible to its subject. Our awareness of it could be attributed to the activity of the active intellect, which sits above the passive intellect while this operates. This is how every conscious human being knows for certain that reason is in operation while in act. Whereas awareness of the passive intellect is a given, the active intellect is more elusive. Aristotle captured this fact when he said that the soul is the most difficult thing to know (see above). The question is then, how can we know the active intellect? To confront this dilemma, let us turn to Aquinas. He argues that God—the most perfect being—understands everything that there is to understand and awakens the understanding in other creatures. Aquinas sees the human intellect’s operation as a spark of the divine light. According to him, ‘the divine light that is in us is nothing other than a certain likeness of the uncreated light, obtained through participation, in which the eternal natures are contained’ (S. Th. I, q. 84, a. 5, c). We might interpret this claim as a reference to Aristotle’s active intellect, incorruptible and constantly active. In his commentary to Aristotle’s De Anima, Aquinas further acknowledges that ‘knowledge cannot start up ex nihilo, and that the human intellect, if left unaided, would be incapable of having any knowledge’ (R. Pasnau, Thomas Aquinas on Human Nature, p. 307). Based on this intuition, we might hypothesise that this help is actually the light of the active intellect, which embodies the likeness of the ‘uncreated light of God’. The idea is that, guided by the divine intellect, which is fully transparent to itself, the active intellect is also transparent to itself, knowing about it and its larger role in cognition by virtue of its proximity to the divine light of God. In the view of more recent Aristotle’s commentators, the active intellect has its own operations. To separate such operations from those of the passive intellect, we may call the operations of the active intellect ‘habits’. Habits can be generally defined as acts or operations that improve after exercise. The most prominent habits are those of the will, otherwise called ‘virtues’, on account of which an action can be easily undertaken later on by its repeated exercise. Virtues bring a substantial increase to a subject’s capacity to do X when X is a virtuous or good action, even when endangered by adversity or opposition. Thus, the virtuous subject prevails over difficulties, and in choosing to do the good becomes a better subject. For example, when a judge imparts fair justice, she undoes an unjust situation that concern people who are unrelated to her, but this decision also makes her more just. Thus she progresses morally and her resolution to the good consolidates. The intellect has similar habits. Intellectual habits are created at the beginning of rational activity, increasing and strengthening in time as the intellect develops. Habits are characterised by the fact that they can be acquired with a single intellectual act. Once acquired, intellectual habits are exercised at ease, but we cannot perceive them without substantial intellectual effort, and are often less self-evident than the virtues of the will. This opacity does not prevent them from being similar to virtues. Just as the fair judge invigorates her will, the habits of the active intellect also invigorate the power of the intellect to perceive. This vigour shows up in the fact that intellectual objects become closer and familiar to the intellect. Consequently, after repeated intellectual exercise every intellectual operation becomes an easier way to truth, and a more profound understanding of reality. Aquinas distinguished three central intellectual habits:



29

MASTERS OF ARTS IN PHILOSOPHY & ETHICS MAPE 8102 The Development of Thinking, Knowledge and Science Prof. Miguel Garcia-Valdecasas, PhD. University of Navarra, [email protected]

(1) The habit of first principles. According to Aquinas, intellect activity arises with a simple understanding of the first principles. ‘The first principles become cognized by the natural light of the active intellect; nor are they acquired through reasoning, but only through their terms’ being made known’ (In Met. IV 6, 599). The most basic of first principles is the principle of noncontradiction, that says that a thing and its opposite cannot coexist at the same time and in the same way. For example, a chair cannot be blue and not-blue at the same time and in the same way. It is either blue or not-blue, and to think otherwise is metaphysically impossible. This principle shows that reality has a solid foundation at its core, an intrinsic stability of properties that excludes contradiction as a possible quality of things. (2) The habit of science. Aquinas envisions this habit as an ability to illuminate a valid conclusion in a set of premises. By this habit, science demonstrates, that is, shows the logical validity of deriving certain conclusions on the basis of certain premises. The habit of science is not what we call today ‘science’ or ‘natural science’, because it is an intellectual act rather than a body of knowledge of the kind of geometry or history. This habit addresses what can be called ‘intermediate causes’, that is, causes like water evaporation and the photosynthesis of plants that only can be grasped in the light of the first principles. We know about them, and are not surprised that they exist and so on because we have already grasp the first principles of reality. Science builds on this habit to make knowledge larger and more progressive with the help of scientific investigation. The habit of science helps us to consolidate knowledge of intermediate causes by leading premises into conclusions. (3) The habit of wisdom. In Aquinas’ view, this is the supreme habit. Quoting Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Aquinas argues that wisdom ‘considers the highest and deepest causes’ (S. Th. I-II, q. 57, a. 2), or the causes that can be called ‘transcendental’. This is thus the habit of the ultimate understanding of reality. By this habit, the intellect manages to order and judge on the content and extent of any other science by going back to the first causes. In a way, then, wisdom could be described as an arbiter of any other scientific knowledge on account of its unparalleled understanding of what grounds any scientific knowledge. 6.4 Practical reason Aristotle divided the territory of the intellect in two. One is the territory of theoretical reason, which we have already canvassed, and another is the territory of practical reason. Theoretical reason is characterised by its orientation to truth, that is, to know, contemplate and understand reality. On the other hand, practical reason is oriented towards the good, that is, towards the identification and realisation of the good. Aristotle points out that the soul has a twofold capacity: ‘the faculty of discrimination which is the work of thought and sense, and the faculty of originating local movement’ (De An. III 9, 432a 15-17). This is the first time in which reason is associated with something like ‘local movement’, that is, the action that many times follows the identification of something as good. Certainly, reason is not the only source of action. To show it, Aristotle claims: ‘these two events appear to be the sources of motion: appetite and thought’ (De An. III 10, 433a 9-10). ‘Appetite’ refers to the already analysed connection between the estimative and action. This is reflected in the way in which the animal is automatically driven off by fire. By nature, instinct urges the animal to escape from fire. Its instinct instils in it the motivation necessary to act in according to the best good of the animal, which is to stay away. In contrast, ‘thought’, which is not an appetite but practical reason, is a capacity to trigger local (bodily)



30

MASTERS OF ARTS IN PHILOSOPHY & ETHICS MAPE 8102 The Development of Thinking, Knowledge and Science Prof. Miguel Garcia-Valdecasas, PhD. University of Navarra, [email protected]

movement upon the identification of a good. Nevertheless, unlike appetite, practical reason has no power whatsoever to command any bodily motion, since it operates through the will. In other words, reason is not in straight command of our body. Let us recall that it is a faculty that is simply orientated towards truth. The way to ‘originate local movement’, that is, to order any change in the body is to persuade the will to act in pursuit of some good. The will and reason are reciprocal faculties; they collaborate and join forces in pursuit of rational goals. Strictly speaking, epistemology has a manifest interest in reason and only a derivative interest in the will, but we can only understand human action if we pay some attention to the role of the will. In Aristotle’s account, practical reason originates in this way. Human action starts with the identification of some good which is presented to the will; to do something voluntarily, the will needs to be presented with a specific action such as to open or shut the window. If the will chooses to obey reason, the ensuing action is rational inasmuch as it is the action that we have intellectually considered our best good. The will does not take orders from the internal senses, especially from the cogitative, but only from reason. If your instincts desire something, e.g. to quench your raging thirst now, which implies to momentarily vacate your office in working hours, the will does not take such a pang as an order to act. I said that the will is a hierarchically higher capacity. And what is higher does not take orders from what is lower in the cognitive hierarchy. It is only when reason finds the object of desire reasonable, that is, convenient, that the will considers whether to pursue it or not. In this way, something that may have been the object of desire is no longer fancy or capricious; it is rather chosen and pursued because it is good for us. At certain times, the consideration of a possible action does not cause any action. If in the face of danger, somebody hesitates whether to pull the trigger of a gun or not, but hesitates, this is a good sign, because it means that cannot envisage the benefit of her action. Instead, she is rapidly considering the irreversible consequences of her shot and her ensuing responsibility in the damage that the shot may potentially cause. After this reassessment, whether she decides to pull the trigger or not, her action cannot longer be said to be the result of her appetite or whim. Now we are certain that her action was deliberate. It is no surprise then, that practical reason involves the responsibility of the rational agent. Note that the identification of the good in general is very different from the identification of what is good in practical situations. Both the righteous and the villain coincide in their identification of the good at the general level. Both agree that the good is something that must be pursued and evil avoided. Nevertheless, they disagree in the identification of what is good in the circumstances of one’s life. The universal identification of the good simply involves the intellectual consideration that good should be pursued. This consideration is not specific, and therefore does not involve the identification of a feasible good such as learning. In practical reason, the identification of good at the practical level is a call to its realisation. Thus, if I identify learning as unquestionably good for me, I see that I should learn and expand my knowledge no matter the obstacles that this entails. When I understand that learning is good, together with this identification I receive a call to act in accord with it. The intellectual virtue concerning practical reason is prudence. Prudence helps the agent to choose better and to remain faithful to her choice despite the obstacles that she may encounter. In a particular circumstance, a prudential decision might look like this. ‘Should I bribe the policeman that threatens me with confiscating my driving licence?’ I know that



31

MASTERS OF ARTS IN PHILOSOPHY & ETHICS MAPE 8102 The Development of Thinking, Knowledge and Science Prof. Miguel Garcia-Valdecasas, PhD. University of Navarra, [email protected]

bribes are a bad choice, because bribes feed a corrupted system that seems hard to stop. But at the same time I need my driving license to arrive at the workplace and be able to sustain my family; I cannot risk losing it. Tough decisions like this can only be adequately solved with prudence, which may point in the right direction when honestly looked for it. To find out what is good in practical cases is not straightforward. We cannot substitute prudential decisions with ethical playbooks, that is, with rules or norms. In general, yes, we know that bribes are not morally good; there are many reasons to reject them. Very few people will deny it, and very few people will argue that they should be pursued. However, the identification of what must be done in practice is not patterned in a general rule, even if the understanding of this rule is an essential requisite of prudence. Prudence does not consist in the straightforward application of rules. Even less is it a matter of intuition. Many moral dilemmas of real life cannot be adequately solved with bare intuitions, because these intuitions tend to be overly sentimental and may often be unjust. Accordingly, the exercise of prudence requires learning, careful reflection and self-determination to do what is right. Ultimate moral dilemmas are thus negotiated prudentially, rather than intuitively. By acting consistently in accordance to what is prudent, the moral agent acts in a principled manner. Justice is a practical virtue as central as prudence. Some people claim that justice consists in treating everyone equally, that is, in treating everyone exactly in the same way. They interpret this rule by giving everybody the same consideration. However, the direct application of the rule of equality may bring out blunt injustice. We know that some people are poor, sick, unprotected or unable to look for themselves. Given their plight, we ought not to treat equally those who stand unequal by nature. In this way, true justice demands that we treat differently those who are different, especially, those who placed in a bad position by life. Therefore, to be truly just, one must weigh the equality of justice against the inequality of people. This will normally involve doing more for those who are most needed of help, both as individuals and as members of a community. Putting fragile individuals first is the object of true justice, that is, of giving everyone what is just in light of the good.



32