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Mini-Course in Philosophy The Epistemological Question |
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Section 3: The Sources of Certitude Topics:
a) Evidence Evidence is the light of truth shining into the mind and making it see. It is the understandable object or thing as clearly known. Sometimes evidence is immediate, that is, sometimes it requires no thinking out, no medium of reasoning through which it can be made to appear. It appears at once and directly, even as a blazing light appears at once and directly, and we need no other light with which to seek and find it. An immediately evident truth is called self-evident. Thus it is immediately evident to the mind that "a totality is greater than any of its parts." The very meaning of "totality" and "part" necessitates this judgment. Sometimes truth does not immediately appear and must be sought by other light than that which manifestly abides in it. Thus the schoolboy's knowledge that the sum of the angles of a triangle is 180 degrees is not immediately evident, but must be worked out through the medium of reasoning. Evidence that must thus be worked out is called mediate evidence. Evidence, to be of value, must be objective, or, more accurately, trans-subjective. It must not be the mere feeling or the mere viewpoint or the mere taste of the person (called the subject) who seeks it or is influenced by it; it must not be subjective. Objective evidence is the ultimate criterion of truth, the ultimate basis of certitude. For it is the truth "right there looking at you"; it is reality unfolded before the mind; it is the light shining from reality into the understanding and making the mind see.
b) Evidence of the Senses The channels of knowledge for man are the senses and the mind. These bring in their findings; they note and accept evidence; they are sources of truth and certitude. Man's knowing begins with the senses, and with the exterior senses. It does not end there, but it necessarily begins there. The mind takes the findings of the senses and peers beneath their materiality and their limitations to grasp essences and form ideas, and from ideas to form other ideas, and with ideas to make judgments and reasonings. But it all begins with the action of the senses upon this bodily world. There are two classes of senses, exterior senses (commonly listed as five: sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch or feeling) and interior senses (listed as four: sense-consciousness, sense-memory, imagination, instinct). [Note: the term "instinct" here has a different technical meaning than it does in the empirical sciences of psychology and zoology.] Each sense lays hold of reality in its own way. That is, each sense has its own object. The external senses take in bodily reality (in cognitional image or species) but no one sense takes in all bodily reality. The object of a sense is proper if that one sense alone can perceive this object. It is common if two or more senses can grasp it. The sense of sight or vision can perceive actual physical color, or, if one chooses to be more accurate, the reflection of refracted light from bodily surfaces. No other sense can perceive color. Color (which is fundamentally "light") is therefore the proper object of the sense of sight. But both the sense of sight and the sense of touch can perceive bodily motion; I can see that a wheel is turning, or I can place a hand upon it and feel the motion. So also with the shape of a body; I can see that a ball is round, or I can take it in my hands and feel its roundness. Thus shape and local movement are common objects of sense. Both proper and common objects of sense are perceived in themselves. By experience the senses also learn to grasp objects which are not themselves perceivable by the senses employed; these objects are said to be perceived accidentally. Thus a man can perceive that an apple is sour by tasting it; he perceives the sourness in itself. But a man who knows apples may be able to see that the apple is sour because his experience tells him that apples of that size, color, and kind are sour apples; he sees the sourness, not in itself, for it is not visible; he sees the sourness accidentally by reason of its known association with what he sees. Now, the senses are to be judged, in respect to their reliability, upon their proper action; upon the fact that they do not fail to do what they are manifestly framed for doing. When a single sense is used upon a common object, or when the senses are used for accidental perception, we have surely no right to cry "deceit!" if the judgment founded on such sensings turns out to be false. The senses are wonderfully versatile, and we tend to use them upon other than their proper objects, but we have no right in the world to demand precise and accurate reports from senses so used. Rightly used, the senses are infallible. And the senses are rightly used when, and only when, the following requirements are observed:
The assertion that, so used, the senses are infallible is thus established: All human knowledge acquired in this life begins with the action of the external senses, and rests upon sensation (that is, sense-action) as upon its ultimate foundation. If this foundation is insecure, no human knowledge is reliable. And if no human knowledge is reliable, we are once enmeshed in the insane self-contradictions of skepticism, which is a wholly impossible position. Therefore, we are compelled to acknowledge the reliability of the senses. For the rest, the senses, rightly used, in accordance with the requirements noted, are found to square with reality; the test of experience finds in them no deceit, no contradiction, no twist or difficulty. And reason compels us to acknowledge the justice of the five conditions or requirements for the right use of the senses. The senses therefore can be the source of valid evidence; the senses can be the remote source of intellectual certitude. The fact that judgment based on sense-findings is sometimes erroneous is owing always to one of two causes:
c) Evidence of the Mind An idea or concept is the representation or the re-presence in the mind of the essence of a reality. Ideas or concepts are compared by the mind, and used as the subjects and predicates of judgments. Judgments are thoughts. Judging is thinking. But judgments are not always available upon the simple comparison of a subject-idea and a predicate-idea. Sometimes they must be worked out from other judgments so connected as to lead to them as necessary conclusions. This working out process, this extension of thinking, is called reasoning. The question now before us is this: are judging and reasoning reliable; do these processes present acceptable and even compelling evidence to the mind so as to beget certitude? To answer this question we must proceed with great exactness. The judging and the reasoning (that is, the "thinking") here to be investigated are fundamentally a matter of ideas or concepts. If the ideas are truly representative of reality, then the relations among those ideas are surely capable of supplying evidence for certain judgings and reasonings. Our question comes then to this: are ideas actually representative of reality? We assert that they are, and for these reasons:
Ideas are valid. In judging, the mind accepts the evidence which the ideas afford. When the mind takes other evidence than that which the ideas themselves afford, it judges by reason of authority, of which we have yet to speak. Here we consider only the fact that the mind can find evidence intrinsic to ideas. Of course, the mind may make erroneous judgments, but these are made through accidental causes, chief of which are presumption which leads the mind to judge upon ideas that are obscure (that is, to judge without really knowing the evidence) and a headlong impatience for reaching judgment without due labor (again, without knowing and weighing the evidence). Erroneous judgments come, not from evidence, but from the lack of it or the failure to take it. But when the mind proceeds with caution, prudence, and honest effort, there is no error. Ideas are built upon evidence gathered from the senses. Judgments are built upon evidence presented in ideas. Reasonings are built upon evidence afforded by judgments. Now, if the first foundation of all this building (that is, sense-action and sense-findings) be secure and solid, as it can be secure and solid; if the work of building be legitimately done according to the requirements which the nature of the process indicates, there can be no sane doubt about the security and solidity of the whole edifice. In a word, intellectual evidence, rightly taken, is a valid source of certitude.
d) Authority Authority as a source of certitude is reliable testimony. It is evidence gathered from the words of a reliable speaker or writer, or from such works of man as reliably express a fact or a doctrine. Can testimony of this sort be relied upon? Reason declares that it can when it meets certain definite requirements. That the source of testimony (the witness, or the thing which embodies an expression of fact or doctrine) be of value, it is required:
In a word, if you understand exactly what a man says and what he means; if you know, or he can show, that he is telling the truth, and that he knows what he is talking about, you reasonably accept his word. You believe him; you put faith in him. You have the moral certitude which is called the certitude of faith, although, where there is a question of merely human testimony; you cannot have absolute or philosophical certitude which is called the certitude of science. Authority offers evidence which recommends itself to reason and which invites the will to issue the command, "Accept this." Human authority cannot compel assent, as intrinsic evidence does; human authority is always extrinsic evidence. Once you know what a circle is and what roundness is, you cannot refuse to be certain that a circle is round; the evidence is intrinsic; it is right in the ideas of "circle" and "roundness." But if a man tells you that a large building is perfectly circular (a thing you cannot safely judge by merely looking at the building) you want to know something about that man before you take his word. You want to know whether he is a liar, or a joker, or a person stating a fact, and you want to know how he knows the building is circular. But if you are satisfied that he has knowledge of what he reports, and that he is neither a liar nor a joker, you realize that, while you could stubbornly refuse to believe him, it would be silly to do so. You realize that in the circumstances it would be imprudent to cling to doubt. You have here the least and lowest sort of evidence from authority; it is called "the imprudence of doubt." It can give you a true moral certitude, however. Now, suppose you have knowledge that the man who tells you the building is circular is the architect who designed the building. Suppose, too, you have his word confirmed by the contractor who controlled the work of building, and also by the owner who made the specifications. Suppose, too, you have the world of other men who have measured and tested the building for circularity. You have then a series of witnesses to a fact, and these lend increased power to the evidence, not by reason of their number, but by the fact that they check and confirm one another. As a consequence, you are no longer impelled to accept the evidence by a mere imprudence of doubt in the circumstances; you have positive evidence which urges you to accept it. You have a much stronger basis for certitude than the simple imprudence of doubt. Still, you could refuse it; for in matters of human faith, in points of moral certitude, the mind assents to evidence only under the orders of the will; for this reason faith is sometimes poetically described as "a genuflection of the will." The most noteworthy expressions or embodiments of testimony are what we are told orally, what is written in history, and what is memorialized in statues, coins, relics, inscriptions, etc. These types of testimony are known as tradition, history, and monuments respectively. They are valuable in so far as they meet the tests of human authority, that is, in so far as they can be shown to be the testimony of one who knows, and of one who speaks truly, and of one who is clearly understood. When they meet these tests, the three types of human authority or testimony are reliable objective evidence and a true source of certitude. Much if not most of our knowledge is based upon the objective evidence of authority, of testimony. All historical knowledge is so evidenced, and indeed much scientific knowledge even in the realm of the laboratory. For each experimental scientist cannot spend his life repeating the experiments made by his predecessors. Now, if authority is thus commonly accepted as the source of certitude, if the demands of daily life make it imperative that it be so accepted, if its acceptance does not bring us into conflict with reality but serves us smoothly in our dealings with reality, then it proves itself authentic stuff. It is to be accepted as a reliable source of moral certitude; to reject it stubbornly would be merely silly. However, much deceit is in the world. Historians can make mistakes; nay, historians can lie, and they sometimes do. Men may speak out of their ignorance or their malice; they may embalm their mistakes and their deceits in lasting works and printed books. Yet all this does not invalidate our argument that human authority can be and often is the source of true certitude. For we have means of testing the reliability of testimony. What a witness says can be checked and rechecked against other testimony, against the witness of contemporaries, against facts discovered by patient research. And if all truth which relies on human testimony cannot be thus established, at least a great deal of it can be. In the patient and painstaking application of the tests for credibility we can, for instances, know the major facts of history. As to historical circumstances, those lesser facts, we are often left hopeless of achieving true certitude. On the one hand, then, we must not be gullible, and take every statement, especially every printed statement, as proof of the truth of what is stated. On the other hand, we cannot reasonably refuse to accept the tested evidence of tested witnesses. A final word. We live in a credulous age, and its babyish credulity is large in direct ratio to its smug conviction that it is a learned and enlightened age. We are too apt to accept unquestioningly any evidence that is offered, especially if it purports to come from "experts," that eerie modern band of soothsayers. We are all too ready to believe firmly in "anything we see in the papers" or anything that is told to us by men or women who broadcast news by radio or television. As a consequence, much of what we think is our true and certain knowledge is really opinion, and often very shaky opinion. The cant words, "science," "modern views," "progressive thinkings," "experts," "leaders," "reliable sources," and so on, easily deceive us. Although we think ourselves hardheaded and clear-minded, we are in fact the most bewildered and bamboozled generation that the world has ever known. For modern agencies of communication are so multiplied, that from every side, from every angle, come shouting voices that order us about, and plead with us, and make up "propaganda" for us, and press us, and bring us under stresses and influences and tendencies. We have need now, as never before, to subject human testimony to rigid and searching inquiry; to know, before we believe, that the testimony is straight, that we understand it in its plain meaning, and that the witness is not a teller of lies or a clear twister of truths.
Summary of the Section In this Section we have learned the meaning of evidence. We have seen that objective evidence, which can be intrinsic, or extrinsic, is the ultimate source of certitude, and the ultimate criterion of truth. We have investigated the senses, the mind, and authority as fonts of evidence and consequently of certitude. We have tried to establish the value of these fonts. We have noticed some sources of mistaken or falsified evidence which are likely to deceive the unwary mind.
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