“How do we know?” “What is the nature of humankind?” Since the beginning of the Inquiry course we have been confronted by the complexity of both of these question.  Dr. McCarthy’s opening plenary lecture brought to our attention the fact that various questions about knowledge have very different answers: “How do we know the density of water?” “How do we know what causes anorexia nervosa?”  “How do we know what causes homosexuality?” “How do we know who ruled England in 1066?” “How do we know how to communicate with each other?” “How do we know who we are?” “How do we know whether or not God exists?”  “How do we know what is beautiful?” “How do we know what is right?” These questions have different types of answers, different strategies that must be adopted in order to respond to them as meaningful questions at all.  When we move into the second semester of  Inquiry we will focus on two different questions: “What is the good and how can we attain it?”  and “What should we make our ultimate concern?”  Obviously these questions enfold those of the first semester.  Any claim about what is good and about what should be our ultimate concern must answer the questions how do we know what is good?  How do we know what should be our ultimate concern?  So before we make any preliminary attempt to respond to the questions of the second semester, we had better make sure that we have some clear ideas about the answers to the first.

Given that there is a plurality of answers to the questions “how do we know. . .?” we might conclude that knowledge itself is plural: that there is no one thing that we can call knowledge.  We have to ask, what is knowledge?  Is there an essential attribute to all examples of knowledge that unites them all?  During the earliest era of Western philosophy Plato (427-347 BCE) considered this question.  What must be the case, he asked, for the sentence “I know this,” to be a true sentence?  First, it must be that case that I believe this.  Obviously.  But, equally obviously, that is not all.  No amount of believing that the world is flat will make the world flat.  The most strongly held belief is still distinct from knowledge.  In order to be true knowledge, the statement that “I know this” must involve not only belief, but true belief.  That is, not only must I believe “this,” but “this” (whatever it might be) must be the case.

Is that it?  Is it simply the case that knowledge equals true belief?  Well, no, you knew it couldn’t be that simple, didn’t you?  Imagine that, in an earlier age when perhaps the belief that the world is flat was widespread, you met a man who told you that the earth is, in fact, round.  Aha! You think, someone who knows the shape of the world.  After all, he believes that the world is round and you, with your 20th century technology and pictures from space, know that his belief is a true belief.  Thus it is “knowledge,” is it not?  But then your gifted confidant tells you how it is that he knows that the world is round.  He has noticed that the insoles of his feet are slightly concave, and he reasons that God, who designed the human frame with care and intelligence, would not give us curved feet to walk upon a flat surface.  Therefore, the surface of the world must be curved, therefore the world must be round!   Aha, you now think, not only does this guy not know that the world is round, but I wonder where he can get psychiatric help here in the Middle Ages.

The point here is that belief does not become knowledge simply by virtue of being true, it becomes knowledge if and only if it is justified by an acceptable explanation.  That is, knowledge is not just true belief, but adequately justified true belief.  For “I know this” to be true, it must be the case that I believe this.  It must also be the case that “this” is true, and, finally, it must also be the case that I can, as Plato put it, give the logos for this.  (Well, he would, put it that way, wouldn’t he?   He was Greek, after all.)

But what is this “logos,” this “justification” which magically transmutes the leaden metal of mere opinion into the pure gold of knowledge?  Logos is the root of our word “logic” as well as of all of those “~logy” endings like biology or psychology or geology.  It is the noun from the Greek verb legein, which generally means to say or to speak, but also has the sense of to organize or to arrange.  Certainly it means to speak with forethought, consideration, and organization. To give the logos for something meant to locate that something in an extended matrix of description.  It meant to be able to elucidate a theory about why your belief is not only true but also justified, to say why something is the way it is, not just that it is that way.  You might say that it is to give the intellectual history of an item of knowledge or fact.  It is not simply a coincidence that the French word for history, histoire, also means “story” in French, or that the Italian, storia, likewise means both history and story, and is essentially the same as our word “story.”  That piece of information that makes the claim to knowledge must be believed, it must be true, and it must come complete with a narrative that starts with something which we could experience and moves from this to a support of that claim.  At least that was Plato’s claim, and he told a pretty good story.

The students from my section of Inquiry have got good reason to be a little puzzled, if not downright annoyed, at this point.  I have spent considerable effort trying to get them to distinguish between a “story” and other different styles of narration, and now, here I am seemingly using the word story arbitrarily to indicate any kind of supporting narrative.  Well, it must be noted that Plato specifically distinguished between logos: that reasoned, sensible history that conformed to all the other logoi and followed the rules of the world of known experience, and mythos: that irrational, fantastic story that conforms to nothing but itself and breaks all the rules of the world of our experience.  (I wonder if this could be a left brain/right brain distinction, four centuries before the Christian era?)  This principle of conformability is of considerable significance.  The bigger, the longer, the more detailed the logos, the better the justification, the more true the truth, and the more certain the knowledge.  Lived human experience functions as an arbiter, a standard to which a story must conform in order to be added to the similarly conforming, mutually supportive, and thus unified group of logoi and excluded from the contrary, mutually non-supporting, and thus isolated mythoi.  If a piece of information can be seen to be supported by a “story” or explanation which conforms to human experience, it can be seen to be supported by all the other such explanations.  Whereas any explanation which goes beyond the bounds of human experience remains isolated and can make appeal only to a small group of mythoi.

I will take my lead from this analysis of Plato, then.  Although I, personally, can accept the elements of belief and narration, I still find that the inclusion of the category of “truth” in Plato’s narrative is a problem.  What exactly is “truth?”  Isn’t it precisely what makes a piece of knowledge, knowledge, and isn’t it thus just as mysterious an entity as knowledge?  But we can avoid that additional headache on the grounds that it is the same logos which makes a claim true as makes a piece of information knowledge.  So, that leaves us with the idea that knowledge is belief supported and justified by an extended and coherent group of narratives that conform to human experience. “Truth” is a characteristic of a proposition that is believed based on an extended and coherent narrative of the world of experience and knowledge is what is given by that proposition to the one who believes in it.  Narratives can be “story-like” in the sense that they have plot and character development (remember Dr. Perkins telling us that he told stories, pieces of fiction, so as to tell the truth?)  Or they can be “scientific,” like Dr. Compher’s account of the genetic roots of homosexuality.  But in order to lay claim to the status of knowledge, they must conform to the yardstick of human experience.  To be perfectly clear here, I do not want to be mistaken for an empiricist or positivist.  That is, I do not mean to imply that they must conform to human sensory perception or physical experience.  I have experienced love, justice, honor, and virtue, along with a few less pleasant abstractions, and I did not experience these with my bodily senses.  You cannot see, feel, smell, taste or hear these things, yet you experience them nonetheless, so I do not intend to reject the abstract as part of the world of our experience, as we will see.

Repeatedly during this semester we have encountered “stories” that are told about beliefs, which are effective means of reinforcing their truth and supporting their claim to the status of knowledge.   The claims of the prisoners in Plato’s allegory of the cave about the nature and status of the shadows were coherent and were supported by their narratives, until challenged by the more compelling narrative of the escaped philosopher.  The accounts given by those victims of anorexia and bulimia about their own appearance are the logoi which narrate their self-image into the status of perceived truth.  Alice Walker’s belief in her own inferiority was reinforced by her self-narration about the “glob” in her eye and her loss of beauty, and it almost became true until counteracted by the innocent and compelling verbalization of her daughter that there was a world in her eye.

In order to attain the status of logos, that is, to be an effective and genuinely supportive narrative, these accounts must conform to the world of human experience.  They cannot contradict that experience; they must partake of the same organization as that world.  The elements of the narrative must reflect and be reflected by the external world in which we live.  They must be organized and organizable in the same way.  The main organizing principles of our lives and of our narratives are abstractions like those that I was earlier at pains to retain in my analysis: like love, justice, honor, virtue and, of course, their counterparts, hatred, injustice, corruption, and vice.  (Although these counterparts can easily be seen as nothing in themselves but the absence of the positive virtues, it is nonetheless interesting that these abstractions always come in binary pairs.)  And, of course the greatest abstraction of them all—the heading under which all these pairs can be arranged—is the couplet of good and bad.  For Plato himself the idea of the good was the single great Ideal Form upon which all other forms depend, and this, of course, leads us to the first of the second semester’s questions: “what is the good and how do we attain it?”

What I mainly want to point out here is that it is crucial to our ability to assess the status of a narrative in supporting the claim to truth or knowledge that we have a consistent understanding of good and bad and the other abstract characteristics organized under this heading and of any other abstract classifications by means of which we organize our narratives about the world of our experience.  Yet in order to know what is the good, we have to support our propositions concerning the good with narratives, logoi, which justify them.   That is the main theme and focus of my talk today.  Immanuel Kant’s description of the good and his narrative explanation of what constitutes it, his logos which justifies his description.

It is an almost universal tradition in explaining Kant to begin with a mention of the great Scottish philosopher, David Hume, (1711-1776) because it was in reaction to Hume that Kant (1724-1804) produced his finest work.  Hume had pointed out that there are certain problems with established human reasoning that seemed to him insoluble.  First, in the realm of scientific reasoning there is the problem of induction.  It was Hume who established that in reasoning from the specific to the general, or from the past to the future, we can never attain certainty, only a degree of probability.  In fact, the question that Hume raised was far more troubling than that.  In arguing that something that has happened repeatedly in the past will happen again in the future, or in arguing that from a number of particular truths we can affirm a general universal truth, we necessarily assume that the course of nature will always continue uniformly the same.  But is our assumption justifiable, what possible logos can we give for it?  We might claim that, in the past, things that have happened repeatedly have continued to happen the same, therefore, in the future they will still continue to happen the same.  But if we do, we make precisely the same assumption that we are trying to justify, and this assumption thus remains always and forever unjustifiable.
When I am convinced of any principle [says Hume], ‘tis only an idea, which strikes more strongly upon me.  When I give the preference to one set of arguments above another, I do nothing but decide from my feeling concerning the superiority of their influence.  Objects have no discoverable connexion together; nor is it from any other principle but custom operating upon the imagination, that we can draw any inference from the appearance of one to the existence of another.  (Treatise of Human Nature, book 1, part 3, section 8)

Thus Hume challenged to possibility of any real knowledge of things in general.  He challenged the very possibility of universal truths.  Second, in the realm of moral reasoning Hume pointed out that, as he put it, “no is implies an ought.”  That is, no actual state of affairs in the world can directly and unequivocally tell us what we should do in response to that state of affairs.  What is the case is factual, matter or fact, empirical, and physically ascertainable, but what ought to be, or what ought to be done, is a matter of abstract values which can never be dictated by factual states of affairs.  All general truths, both moral and scientific, all claims to universally valid knowledge are either simply habitual (from custom, as Hume put it) or tautological (that is, in the realm of mathematics, for example, 2 + 2 = 4, because 2 + 2 is the same thing as 4.  All universal truths are likewise of the same form as “all bachelors are unmarried men,” or “all whales are mammals.”  They are true by virtue of the very definition of a bachelor or a whale.)  Finally,  according to Hume, experience can never produce knowledge that is universal.

Kant had been comfortably teaching philosophy in the succession of his German forbears until Hume’s arguments, as he put it “woke me for my dogmatic slumbers.”  He realized that he had something really to worry about here and so he set to work to produce his Critiques, The Critique of Pure Reason, and The Critique of Practical Reason, focussing respectively on the bounds and limits of scientific and moral reasoning.  He answered that universal knowledge is real, scientific truths are universally true and constitute genuine knowledge.  He agreed with Hume that mathematical knowledge is a priori, that is, it can be known to be true without requiring physical observation to confirm it. (Obviously, no universal truths can be confirmed by observation: we would have to observe all possible instance at all possible times, past and future.)  Such truths, the truths of geometry, for example, are necessarily true.  It is not possible that they could be false.  And yet, Kant wanted to insist they are not simply tautologous either, because tautologies add nothing new to our knowledge, but simply repeat what we already know.  In order to counter Hume’s problem of induction Kant had to argue that universal knowledge such as geometrical truths are not derived from experience and are thus not derived by induction.  Rather they are based on our knowledge of space, which is not itself given in experience but is prior to it.  Mathematical and scientific universal truths are real knowledge which arises from our experience of the world but is not given to us by that experience.  Rather it is an a priori necessity of the very possibility of experience.  As with space, so with time.  We cannot have any experience without space and time.  These are not simple external features of the world independent of us, but are a priori forms of sensibility, necessary conditions of all sense experience.  Kant had realized for the first time that the mind is not the passive recipient of sensation, but that all mental judgments involve the activity of synthesis.  We constantly and necessarily organize our experience, and space and time are structures of that organization.  As well as these pure a priori forms of sensation, Kant argued, there are twelve “categories” or “pure concepts” of the understanding by means of which the sentient mind organizes its experience.  Among these are substance, cause, and reality.  These are organizing principles that we bring to experience rather than deriving from experience.  These are part of our logos about the truth, not part of the truth itself.  These are shadows cast by the interaction of the active mind with the external world rather than real attributes of external reality.  Note that now “reality” is a category of the understanding.  It is something that we ascribe to our experiences, not something that is given in and by our experiences.  And note also that this conclusion was reached by someone whose aim was to defend the validity of scientific knowledge.

Now, equipped with this understanding of the processes of organizing experience, this logos for the existence of universal truths, which is itself an account of how we can construct coherent and consistent and conforming justifications, how does Kant deal with Hume’s objection to the possibility of universal moral truths.  That is, can he answer the question of what we ought to do in universally valid terms and thus claim real moral knowledge?  To do this Kant looks for genuinely universal moral truths; claims that certain acts are just good, not good for something.  There are, of course, what he calls “hypothetical imperatives,” that is, things that we must do if we want to achieve certain ends.  If you want to go to heaven you must follow the will of God.  If you want to get tenure you should not give dreadfully boring and incomprehensible lectures on philosophy to freshman students.  But Kant wanted a categorical imperative.  Something we must just do, period.  He reasoned that there is such a thing, a simple imperative that ought to be followed for its own sake by, as he put it, all rational beings, because it is right, not for the sake of attaining any end.  This is what he called his categorical imperative, and although he expressed it in as many as five different ways , it is, he claimed, a single principle.  It might, I think, be best stated like this: you ought to always act in such a way that you could sincerely wish the general rule governing your action (what Kant calls a maxim) were a universal law (so that all people must act that way).  For example, if you give to charity you certainly can will that it might be a universal law, like the law of gravity, that everyone gives what they can spare to those who really need it.  So that act is morally justified.  It is a good act.  However, if you owe money to someone and you refuse to give it back, could you honestly will that everyone must act that same way?  No, because if everyone did act that way there could be no notion of lending, no-one would ever give anything back, so no one would ever lend anything, just give it away.

This then, is the narrative, the logos, the story if you will that Kant gives with his claim to know what is the good.  He has been challenged on several grounds, most of these objections are too complex to go into here, but the most often repeated one is simply this: that Kant’s categorical imperative lacks any human warmth, charm, or charity.  One must do what one must do simply out of the logical necessity of conforming to this formulation.  One ought to help little old ladies (and old men, I might add) across the street because it conforms to the categorical imperative and one can will that everyone might act that way, not because one actually cares about the old codger.  I wonder if that is true.  Is the fact that this formula can be given in the dispassionate manner in which Kant states it enough to rob the rule of all the goodness it might accomplish.  But that is a question which, I feel, you should ask yourselves once you have made some judgment on the status of the claim and on the logos which accompanies it.