FOUNTS OF KNOWLEDGE PT. 1

In WHITE NOISE I addressed two types of knowledge. I'll continue to call these "knowledge by acquaintance" and "knowledge by description" after Bertrand Russell, with the stipulation that I'm not following his system, given that I've barely read Russell's work. I have read quite a bit more William James, and admire his work above what I know of Russell's philosophy, but I also have not read the particular work I cited in NOISE, the 1895 PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGY.

It stands to reason that even if James and Russell were among the first to frame the problem in these terms, many philosophers before them had grappled with similar questions. For instance, I quoted James's reference to perceptual and conceptual knowledge in PRINCIPLES, categories which appeared in Schopenhauer fifty years earlier (albeit in German).

Now, I've addressed something akin to the "acquaintance/ description" duality in my writings on symbolic complexity. My concerns were never epistemological, as I believe to be the case for both James and Russell. Rather, in my early definition of my terms "functionality" and "super-functionality," I was concerned with the ways in which literary constructs display complexity or its lack. Still, in one passage from DON'T FEAR THE FURNITURE I touched on the epistemological matters:

....even the most avant-garde artists can't do without some representational functionality. If James Joyce wants a character to go through a door, and doesn't have it in mind to discourse on the doorness of doors everywhere, then the door through which the Joyce character steps will be no less functional-- or even "conventional"-- than the one through which a Poe or Doyle character steps.

Within the context of a purely fictional story, a merely functional representation of a door is no more real than, say, a door in another story that embodies "the doorness of doors." But the purely representational door is supposed to function within a story's diegesis as if the person seeing it knows it purely through "knowledge by acquaintance." A door that was "super-functional" would have to have its "Platonic qualities of door-ness" explicated via "knowledge by description."

In 2011 I glossed my Frye-derived remarks with my reading of Philip Wheelwright's THE BURNING FOUNTAIN. This book is also more concerned with evaluating literary works rather than epistemology, though I suspect that Wheelwright was familiar with the two forms of knowledge described by James and Russell-- not least because both of them are cited in FOUNTAIN, and one James reference is to PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGY. Without re-reading Wheelwright's book in toto, I can't be sure that it has no epistemological concerns. However, this passage from METAPHOR AND REALITY seems to imply such concerns in the author's formulations of "stheno-language" and "poeto-language:"

…meanings that can be shared in exactly the same way by a very large number of persons—in general, by all persons using the same language or the same group of inter-translatable languages. Examples are so obvious that they may be mentioned without explanation. Common words like child, parent, dog, tree, sky, etc., are steno-symbols, and their accepted meanings are steno-meanings, because what each of the words indicates is a set of definable experiences (whether actual or only possible) which are, in certain recognizable respects, the same for all who use the word correctly. (Metaphor and Reality, p. 33.)

 In this paragraph, Wheelwright is not talking purely about functional representations within a poetical work, but about the way said representations are built up in human society. It seems evident that all of the "common words" Wheelwright lists are common because everyone knows basic representations such as "dog" and "sky" through what Russell calls "acquaintance." More complex chains of associations, however, can only be built up through a process of description. No sky has ever looked like the representation of the Greek Ouranos, but Greeks understood the idea of Ouranos through a process of describing the sky-god's nature-- though in some ways the word used by Kim Stanley Robinson, "discursive," may fit the topic better. This is also one of the terms utilized by Ernst Cassirer in his PHILOSOPHY OF SYMBOLIC FORMS, which I'll discuss somewhat in the next post.

WHITE NOISE

I've posted a short review of Kim Stanley Robinson's MEMORY OF WHITENESS here, noting one of the more interesting philosophical observations:

Knowledge by acquaintance is the direct apprehension of something through the senses-- the primary way of knowing.  But discursive knowledge includes all that language does... discourse is as important as acquaintance, even if it isn't primary-- the character "Dent Ios" in THE MEMORY OF WHITENESS.

Perhaps because Robinson's characters exist in an era far removed from the twentieth century, they don't discuss in detail the archaic origin of their philosophical ideas. Indeed, Robinson has a little bit of fun with the idea of attribution, implying that over time scholars may simply get things wrong, as when one character calls modern literary critic Harold Bloom an "alchemist." However, Dent Ios's dual forms of knowledge may have been borrowed from a similar dualism propounded by Bertrand Russell in 1910: "knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description." That said, Russell's duality seems to have been preceded, according to this Wikipedia entry, by similar formulations by at least three other philosophers: John Grote, Hermann von Helmholtz, and William James. I have no idea what if any indebtedness Russell might have to these predecessors, but James apparently reproduces Grote's categories exactly in James's 1890 book THE PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGY:

There are two kinds of knowledge broadly and practically distinguishable: we may call them respectively knowledge of acquaintance and knowledge-about.

Now, most of these philosophers seem to be talking about how humans organize knowledge according to what James calls "perceptual" and "conceptual" knowledge. The characters of MEMORY, however, are not concerned with the way language encodes perceptions, but with the way that music, the least "linguistic" of the arts, does so. On the next page following Dent Ios's assertion, he adds that, "Music is a dynamic, polyphonic process, while writing is linear and static." This seems like an odd thing to say right after he's claimed that discursive knowledge is as important as that of acquaintance. The second statement seems to privilege the dynamism of the direct sense-experience, and to downgrade the "static" qualities of what Grote and James call "knowledge-about." In the 1941 book PHILOSOPHY IN A NEW KEY, Susanne Langer categorically downgrades music as against the more "assertive" arts:

 "[Music] is a limited idiom, like an artificial language, only even less successful; for music at its highest, though clearly a symbolic form, is an unconsummated symbol.  Articulation is its life, but not assertion; expressiveness, not expression.  The actual function of meaning, which calls for permanent contents, is not fulfilled; for the assignment of one rather than another possible meaning to each form is never explicitly made."-- Susanne Langer, PHILOSOPHY IN A NEW KEY, p. 240.

I would tend to agree with Langer more than with Robinson's characters. For exanople, although I agree that discursive knowledge is *primarily* linear, I don't think it is necessarily "static." Great philosophers-- and critics-- always combine the linear/horizontal logic of the discursive process with what I have called "vertical meaning." Such meaning is put forth roughly along the same lines that Levi-Strauss imagines myths being a combination of "harmonic" and "melodic" elements. Plato's TIMAEUS, in seeking to describe the perfect society already envisaged in THE REPUBLIC, does not depend purely on linear logic but finesses that logic with a mythic image from outside the immediate argument: the image of the city Atlantis, whose extinction signals a counter-example to the "perfect society" once represented by its contemporary opponent Athens. 

MORE CASSIRER CONTEMPLATIONS

I continue to make slow progress through Edward Skidelsky's breakthrough book on Ernst Cassirer, not because the book is slow reading but simply due to other distractions.

 Chapter 4 addresses one of the principal ways in which Cassirer's assimilationist ambitions became out of step with the dominant "either/or" tendencies of 20th century philosophy.  Skidelsky asserts that in the early 20th century the "symbolic logic" of Bertrand Russell and Gottlob Frege, which focuses on the logic of "relations," abolished from philosophical circles the mathematics-affiliated logic used by Kant:

Russell extended the logicist enterprise from arithmetic to geometry, eliminating altogether Kant's synthetic a priori (p. 53).

  Skidelsky also observes that in contrast to Herman Cohen, the doyen of the Marburg school, Cassirer was able to assimilate symbolic logic into his burgeoning system, as represented by his "first work of systematic philosophy," SUBSTANCE AND FUNCTION (1910), a book I have not read.
Skidelsky summarizes Cassirer's ability to see that Kant's dependence on the traditional logic of mathematics had been superseded:

The central, defining feature of traditional logic... is that it takes as its starting point a class of individuals.  Concept formation is then envisaged as the abstraction of common properties from the members of this class. Higher-order concepts can be formed through a further process of abstraction, until finally one reaches the ultimately extensive and empty concept of "being." Traditional logic is perhaps adequate to  classificatory systems such as botany and zoology; these were, after all, Aristotle's original prototypes.  But it cannot do justice to mathematics or mathematical natural science, for the concepts of mathematics, as serial concepts, are not abstracted from independently existing classes of objects but rather constructed through the iteration of some basic relation... (p. 59) 

Skidelsky credits Russell with having "shown how the serial concepts of mathematics might be expressed in purely logical terms," in contrast to Kant, who believed that man's inability to reduce mathematics to logic demonstrated that the former's status as "a priori."

However, Russell viewed the logic of relations simply as "the way in which the truth of certain sentences is entailed by the truth of others."  Cassirer, Skidelsky claims, never understood that Russell was entirely focused on using the logic of relations to express "truth-value," while Cassirer "was interested in concepts not simply as components of possible propositions but as tools for the organization and mastery of experience."  In this Cassirer was very much still in the tradition of Kant, with his belief in the supremacy of man's reasoning powers.

Skidelsky faults Cassirer for not having perceived the philosophical gulfs separating him from Russell and other, more popular proponents of symbolic logic.  This counts as a very small fault in my book, however, since I believe that even if Cassirer had been aware of that gulf, it would not have changed his conviction in the power of reason to subsume all differences without eliminating them:

In contrast to Aristotle's generic concept, which obliterates all specific differences, the functional concept retains these differences; indeed, it generates them from out of itself (p. 68).

Anyone familiar with Cassirer will see in this summary the same attitude the philosopher displayed with respect to his "symbolic forms:" a wide-eyed, pluralistic appreciation of both diversity and unity.

I will note in passing that I find it interesting to re-conceive my own current attempts at taxonomy-- that of formulating the generic concepts that unify all forms of the heroic and superheroic idioms-- has probably been informed by the traditional logic of Aristotle.  Still, my purpose in so doing is one that applies more toward a Cassirerean appreciation of unity in diversity, and vice versa, than to Bertrand Russell's concentration on "truth-value."