Lecture 13. Epistemology. Consciousness as a philosophical problem

1. The general concept of thought and the problem of knowability of reality.

2. Methods of scientific knowledge

3. Classical and nonclassical paradigms of scientific rationality.

4. The nature of consciousness and unconsciousness.

 

The theory of knowledge and creativity is an important section of philosophy. It arose historically with philosophy, as its core, around which everything else was built. This department of philosophy considers a wide range of problems: the relationship between knowledge and reality, its sources and driving forces, its forms and levels, the principles and laws of cognitive activity, and the trends of its development. Philosophy analyses the criteria of the authenticity of knowledge, its veracity, and also the causes of error, the problems of the practical application of knowledge.

In the philosophy of the ancient world the basic problems of epistemology were developed by defining types, such as "knowledge" and "opinion", "truth" and "error". Opinion was opposed to knowledge as a subjective notion of the world, while knowledge was its objective investigation. Heraclitus saw the highest goal of cognition in "studying the universal", understanding what was hidden in the universe, the "logos", the universal law. Discussion of the problem of dividing knowledge into types proceeded from the relationship and opposition between ordinary consciousness and standards of theoretical thought, with its techniques of proof, disproof, and so on.

Agnosticism is a philosophical theory that denies the possibility of man's achieving authentic knowledge of the objective world. Some agnostics, while recognising the objective existence of the world, deny its knowability, others regard the very fact of the world's objective, existence as something unknowable. They maintain that knowledge is subjective by its very nature and that we are in principle unable to reach beyond the boundaries of our own consciousness and cannot know whether anything else except the phenomena of consciousness exists. From the standpoint of agnosticism the question of how a thing is reflected by us differs fundamentally from the question of how it exists in itself.

Most characteristic of the 20th century is the agnosticism of neopositivism, which tells us that philosophy cannot provide objective knowledge but must be confined to the analysis of language.

Another source of agnosticism is relativism, that is to say, the absolutising of the variability, the fluidity of things and consciousness. The relativists proceed from the pessimistic principle that everything in the world is transient, that scientific truth reflects our knowledge of objects only at a given moment; what was true yesterday is error today. Every new generation gives its own interpretation of the cultural heritage of the past. The process of cognition is foredoomed to a random pursuit of eternally elusive truth. Relativism works on the assumption that the content of knowledge is not determined by the object of cognition but is constantly transformed by the process of cognition, thus becoming subjective. Absolutising the relative in knowledge, the relativists regard the history of science as movement from one error to another. But if everything is relative, then this assertion, which can have meaning only in relation to the absolute, is also relative.

Knowledge is historically limited, but in every relative truth there is some objective content, which is intransient. The Intransient elements of past knowledge form a part of new knowledge. Scientific systems collapse but they do not disappear without a trace; more perfect theories are built on top of them. One of the forms in which relativism manifests itself is conventionalism, which maintains that the concepts of science are formally accepted postulates, and that the question of whether they correspond to reality may be discarded as irrelevant to science. The history of science is the history of omnipotent cognition, which renounces both the absolutising of achieved scientific truths and their sceptical denial.

Scepticism within reasonable limits is beneficial; but cheap scepticism is like blind fanaticism. They are both equally often encountered in narrow-minded people. Denial of the knowability of the world leads to pessimism about science and to repudiation of its values. And this opens the door to various forms of reaction against reason and science. When attempting to explain any phenomenon it is absurd to assume that it is inexplicable. A person must believe that the incomprehensible can be comprehended; otherwise there is no point in thinking about it.

The concept is a form of thought reflecting the essential properties, relations and connections of objects and phenomena in their contradictions and development; it is thought that generalises, grouping the objects of a certain class according to certain specific attributes that they have in common. Our concepts are objective in their content and universal in their logical form, inasmuch as they are related not to the individual but to the general.

The judgement is a form of thought in which something is asserted or denied about something by linking up certain concepts. For example, the sentence "the maple-tree is a plant" is a judgement in which an idea is expressed about the maple-tree, the idea that it is a plant. Knowledge does not lie in impressions but in judgements, because it is through them that we become aware of truth. As the solution of a certain problem a judgement is a cognitive act, but as a means of achieving the solution it is a logical operation. Logical operations are means of establishing the essential connections and relations between ideas that make thought move cognitively from ignorance to knowledge. Thought is impossible without judgements and judgements are impossible without definitions.

Analysis and synthesis. The process of cognition begins by our getting a general picture of the object without paying much attention to details, particulars. When we look at a thing in this way, its intrinsic structure and essence remain inaccessible to us. In order to study the essence we must break down the object into parts. Analysis is the breaking-down of objects into their component parts or aspects, and this is done by both practical and theoretical work. By analysis we also mean mental consideration of the specific nature of the components. The essence of an object cannot be understood merely by breaking it down into the elements of which it is composed and examining these elements as such. The chemist subjects meat to various operations and then says: "I have discovered that it consists of oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, and so on." But he knows as well as we do that these substances are no longer meat.

Abstraction is the mental identification, singling out of some object from its connections with other objects, the separation of some attribute of an object from its other attributes, of some relation between certain objects from the objects themselves. Abstraction is a method of mental simplification, by which we consider some one aspect of the process we are studying. The scientist looks at the colourful picture which any object presents in real life through a single-colour filter and this enables him to see that object in only one, fundamentally important aspect. The picture loses many of its shades but gains in clarity. Abstraction has its limit. One cannot abstract the flame from what is burning. The sharp edge of abstraction, like the edge of a razor can be used to whittle things down until nothing is left.

Idealisation as a specific form of abstraction is an important technique in scientific cognition. Abstract objects do not exist and cannot be made to exist in reality, but they have their prototypes in the real world. Pure mathematics operates with numbers, vectors and other mathematical objects that are the result of abstraction and idealisation. Geometry, for example, is concerned with exact circles, but physical object is never exactly circular; perfect roundness is an abstraction. It cannot be found in nature. But it is an image of the real: it was brought into existence by generalisation from experience.

Generalisation and limitation. In the process of generalisation we move from individual concepts to general concepts and from less general concepts to more general ones, from individual judgements to general ones, from statements of less generality to statements of greater generality, from less general theory to more general theory, in relation to which the less general theory becomes a particular case of the more general. We should not be able to cope with the abundance of impressions that surge over us every hour, every minute, every second, if we were not constantly uniting them, generalising them and registering them by means of language.

The mental transition from the more general to the less general is a process of limitation. Without generalisation there can be no theory. Theory, on the other hand, is created so that it can be applied in practice to solve certain specific problems. For example, when measuring objects or building certain technical structures, we must always proceed from the more general to the less general and the individual, there must always be a process of limitation. The grotesque fantastic images of mythology with its gods and monsters are closer to ordinary reality than the reality of the microworld conceived in the form of mathematical symbols. One can see that the turn towards the abstract is a very obvious trend of our time. Recourse to the abstract may also be observed in art, in abstract pictures and sculptures.

The abstract and the concrete. The concept of "the concrete" is used in two senses. First, in the sense of something directly given, a sensuously perceived and represented whole. In this sense the concrete is the starting point of cognition. But as soon as we treat it theoretically the concrete becomes a concept, a system of scientific definitions revealing the essential connections and relations of things and events, their unity in diversity. So the concrete appears to us first in the form of a sensuously observable image of the whole object not yet broken down and not understood in its law-governed connections and mediations, but at the level of theoretical thought it is still a whole, but internally differen tiated, understood in its various intrinsic contradictions. The sensuously concrete is a poor reflection of phenomena, but the concrete in thought is a richer, more essential cognition.

Analogy. In the literal sense this word means correspondence, that is to say, an objective relationship between objects that makes it possible to apply the information gained through investigating one object to another object that is similar in certain respects. Analogy, which links the threads of the unknown with the known, lies at the very heart of our understanding of facts. The new can be understood only through the images and concepts of the old, of what is known. The first aeroplanes were invented by analogy with the behaviour of other, objects in flight, such as birds or kites.

Modelling. A characteristic feature of modern scientific cognition is the enhanced role of the method of modelling, which is used with great effect in the technical, natural, and social sciences. Modelling is the practical or theoretical replacement of the object of research by some natural or artificial analogue whose investigation helps us to understand the essence of the original object. For example, by examining the properties of a model aeroplane we get a better understanding of the properties of the real thing. Modelling is based primarily on the principle of reflection, on similarity, analogy, on different objects having certain properties in common, and on the relative independence of form.

Formalisation. The advances of modern science have brought profound changes in the methods of scientific cognition. One of the most important is the method of formalisation—generalisation of the forms of processes that differ in content, abstraction of these forms from their content. Here the form is regarded as a relatively independent object of research. It is sometimes thought that formalisation is connected only with mathematics, with mathematical logic and cybernetics. This is incorrect. Formalisation permeates all kinds of practical and theoretical activity and differs only in degree or level. Historically it arose at the same time as language. Certain techniques of labour activity, certain skills emerged, were generalised, described and passed on from generation to generation in a form divorced from the concrete actions, objects and means of labour.

Historical and logical methods. From the two main aspects of objective process of cognition we draw two methods, the historical and logical. The logical method is used to express the general line, the pattern of development of an object, the development of society from one social formation to another, for example. The historical method is used to describe a concrete manifestation of a given pattern or law in all the infinite diversity of its specific and individual manifestations. In relation to society, for example, this is the real history of all countries and peoples with all their unique, individual destinies.

The logical is a generalised reflection of the historical: it reflects reality in its law-governed development and explains the necessity of this development. The logical is the historical, liberated from the principles of chronology, from its accidental and unique form. For example, when applied to the history of any science, the logical method of research presupposes a generalisation of the historical process, its stripping of all the transient, accidental turns or zigzags evoked by various, often external, relative factors, such as the zigzags of thought of a particular scholar, changes in historical circumstances, and so on. The logical method of research into the actual historical process is thus a matter of abstracting from the real historical process its intrinsic necessity and analysing that necessity in a logically "purified" form.

The empirical and the theoretical in thought. The motion of cognitive thought begins with the empirical, with the observation and establish ing of facts, their analysis and classification, and goes on from there to their generalisation, the making of hypotheses, the testing of these hypotheses and, finally, the construction of theories. Observation is an intentional, planned process of perception, carried out in order to identify the essential properties and relations in the object of cognition. Observation may be direct or indirect, mediated by various technical devices (molecules, for example, are now visually observed by means of electronic microscopes). Observation acquires scientific significance when it allows us on the basis of a research programme to present objects with maximum precision and may be repeated several times in conditions that we deliberately vary. The important thing is to select the most representative group of facts. Hence the importance of the researcher's intention, the system of methods he adopts and his interpretation of results and their control.

Experiment and its results are something that we obtain through our senses. Thought judges the nature of the object through experiment. In itself an experiment only establishes certain facts. Thought penetrates into their essence. What the scientist sees through his microscope or observes through a telescope or a spectroscope demands a certain amount of interpretation.

A fact is a phenomenon of the material or intellectual world which has become an authenticated part of our knowledge. It is the registering of certain phenomena, certain properties and relations. Science begins and ends with facts, regardless of what theoretical constructs are made in between. The statement that an object exists is the first but very limited stage in cognition.

A scientific fact is the result of reliable observation and experiment. It appears in the form of direct observation of objects, the readings of apparatus, photographs, descriptions of experiments, tables, diagrams, notes, archive documents, authenticated evidence of witnesses, and so on. But in themselves the facts are not yet science, just as building material is not yet a building. Facts are woven into the fabric of science only when they are selected, classified, generalised and explained, at least hypothetically.

Hypothesis. Science begins when we enter the realm of the unknown and start making suppositions, conjectures, and hypotheses. It is always much easier to make suppositions than to prove them. The conjecture is a supposition that has not yet been proved but sets out to explain certain facts. Its becoming a hypothesis involves the finding of arguments, the conversion of a miracle into something knowable. The hypothesis is a supposition based on facts, a starting-point for investigation of a part of reality that has not been sufficiently studied. It is a kind of probe with which the scientist takes his first soundings in the world of the unknown, or, to use another image, the scaffolding which is erected and then taken down when the building is finished.

Theory is an internally differentiated, developing system of objectively true, practically tested scientific knowledge that explains a law concerning phenome na in a certain field. Unlike the hypothesis, the theory provides reliable knowledge (including reliable knowledge of the probability of certain events). For example, the idea of the atomic structure of matter remained for a long time only a hypothesis. A theory is changed by incorporating in it new facts, ideas and principles. When a contradiction is discovered in a certain theory, a contradiction that cannot be resolved in the framework of its initial principles, the resolving of this contradiction leads to a new theory.

Truth, error and faith. Any idea, no matter how far-fetched, contains some objective content. Then are mermaids, witches and devils images of truth? The metaphysically-minded materialists, who interpret reflection one-sidedly, deny that there is any reflection of reality in error. Religious conscious ness, for example, is regarded as completely void of any objective content. But the history of humanity's search for knowledge shows that error does reflect, admittedly one sidedly, objective reality, that it has its source in reality, has an "earthly" foundation.

Error is an idea or a combination of ideas and images that arise in the mind of the individual or society and do not correspond to reality but are regarded as true. This definition of error follows logically from that of cognition as the reflection of reality.

Error should be distinguished from the mistake that is the result of incorrect practical or mental activiity, evoked by purely accidental, personal causes. It is commonly believed that errors are annoying accidents. But they have relentlessly pursued knowledge throughout history; they are a kind of penalty that humanity has to pay for its daring attempts to know more than is permitted by the level of practice and the scope of theoretical thought.

The concept of truth is linked with the moral concepts of honesty and sincerity. Truth is the aim of science and honesty is the ideal of moral motivation. Fruitful studies in science and philosophy are impossible where fear of the consequences of thinking is stronger than the love of truth. Truth is authenticated knowledge and knowledge is strength, the greatest strength of all. It cannot be destroyed by prisons, penal servitude, the gallows, the guillotine, or the stake.

Any truth is objective. There is no such thing as unobjective truth. Subjective truth is merely an individual's opinion. So the definition that we have given of truth is at the same time a definition of objective truth. Truth is not reality itself but the objective content of the results of cognition. Its content does not depend on the will, desire, passion or imagination of human beings.

The absolute in truth. In reality the process of cognition is carried on by succeeding generations, who think very restrictedly and only in terms of the given level of development of their culture. Absolute knowledge is therefore only an aim for which science strives and to which the road is endless. Complete knowledge does not exist; we can only approach it, as we do to the speed of light. The development of science is a series of consecutive approximations to absolute truth, of which each is more precise than its predecessor.

The term "absolute" is also used of any relative truth in the sense that if it is objective it must contain something absolute as one of its elements. Absolute truth is a piece of knowledge that is not refuted by the subsequent development of science but enriched and constantly reaffirmed by life. Humanity seeks full knowledge of the world. And although it will never attain such knowledge, it is constantly approach ing it and every step in that direction, although relative, contains something absolute. Taken as a whole, our knowledge of nature and the history of society is not complete, but it contains many grains of the absolute. The development of any truth is an accumulation of moments of the absolute.

The concreteness of truth. One of the basic principles of the dialectical approach to knowledge is recognition of the concreteness of truth. Recognition of this principle means approaching truth not abstractly but in connection with real conditions. The concreteness of truth means that we must pinpoint the decisive concrete historical conditions in which the object of cognition exists and identify the essential properties, relations and basic tendencies of its development. Concreteness is the real connection and interaction of all aspects of the object, knowledge of it in all the wealth of its interactions.

The criteria of truth. Only that which could be clearly apprehended and gave rise to no doubts could be considered true. Descartes' examples of such truths were mathematical statements such as "a square has four sides". Such truths have a distinctness that rules out all doubts. They are the result of the "natural light of reason". Just as light reveals both itself and the surrounding darkness, so is truth the measure of itself and of falsity.

The unity of cognition and practice. The basic form in which human life manifests itself is activity-sensuously objective, practical, and intellectual, theoretical. Man is an active being, not a passive observer at the "feast" of life. He influences things around him, gives them the shapes and properties necessary to satisfy historically evolved social and personal needs. The human being does not merely inhabit nature, he also changes it. Narrow practicism may be harmful to science, particularly its fundamental theoretical departments. It restricts scientific thought, confining it to the limits of the object of research, which are important only for historically transient forms of practice, and thus scales down the range and content of research activity. Conversely, when scientific thought is not fettered by such limits, it is capable of discovering in an object properties and relations that in perspective offer the opportunity of its far more diversified practical use.

Definition of consciousness. Human beings possess the most wonderful of all gifts-reason with its keen insight into the remote past and the future, its penetration into the sphere of the unknown, its world of dreams and fantasy, creative solutions to practical and theoretical problems and the realisation of the most daring plans. As the highest level of human mental activity, consciousness is one of the basic concepts of philosophy, psychology and sociology. The unique nature of this activity lies in the fact that the reflection of reality, and its constructive-creative transformation in the form of sensuous and mental images, concepts and ideas, anticipate practical action by individuals and social groups and give them a goal, an orientation.

Human consciousness is a form of mental activity, the highest form. By mental activity we mean all mental processes, conscious and unconscious, all mental states and qualities of the individual. These are mainly processes of cognition, internal states of the organism, and such attributes of personality as character, temperament, and so on. Mental activity is an attribute of the whole animal world. Consciousness, on the other hand, as the highest form of mental activity, is inherent only in human beings, and even then not at all times or at all levels. It does not exist in the newborn child, in certain categories of the mentally ill, in people who are asleep or in a coma. And even in the developed, healthy and waking individual not all mental activity forms a part of his consciousness; a great portion of it proceeds outside the bounds of consciousness and belongs to the unconscious phenomena of the mind.

Conscious and unconscious phenomena of the mind. The colourful fabric of mental processes is woven out of various "threads", ranging from the supreme clarity of consciousness at moments of creative inspiration, through the dimness of the half-sleeping mind, to the complete darkness of the unconscious, which accounts for a large part of man's mental life. For example, we hardly realise all the consequences of our actions. Not all external impressions are focussed by our consciousness. Many of our actions are automatic or habitual. However, despite the exceptional significance and place of unconscious forms of mental activity, the human being is primarily a conscious being.

Consciousness has a complex relationship with various forms of unconscious mental phenomena. They have their own structure, whose elements are connected with each other and also with consciousness and actions, which influence them and in their turn experience their influence on them selves. We are sensibly aware of everything that influences us, but by no means all sensations are a fact of our consciousness. At the scientific level scientists have for many years now been investigating the behaviour and mental activity of animals, particularly, such higher species as dolphins and apes, which possess amazing ability to imitate and observe. At a recent international conference which discussed the problem of consciousness in animals, most of the delegates said no in reply to the question, "Do animals think?" But the resolution passed by the conference after much argument contained a rather careful formulation: science has not enough facts to affirm with certainty or to deny the ability of animals to think.

Self-consciousness. A human being is aware of the world and his attitude towards it and is thus aware of himself. At this level, the objective and subjective begin to reveal their integral unity. This duality in unity is in fact the "glimmering dawn of self-consciousness". Self-consciousness was the answer to the imperative demand of social conditions of existence, which from the outset required that a person should be able to assess his actions, words, thoughts and feelings from the standpoint of certain social norms and to comprehend not only the surrounding world but also himself.

In the philosophical sense a self-conscious person is one who is fully aware of his place in life, the inevitability of passing through certain growth stages, the finity of his existence as a passing moment in the flow of events. The personality cannot be deprived of its reflexive dimension. This is one of the essential privileges that distinguish man from the animals.

The unity of language and consciousness. Speech is language functioning in a specific situation of communication. It is the activity of communication and its recorded results. Language, on the other hand, is a specific vocabulary and grammar, expressed in rules and sentence patterns, which have been evolved historically and are national in character. But specific sentences, both spoken and written, belong not to language but to speech: they form the symbolic reality that constitutes the existence of language.

The aim of verbal communication is not only understanding and agreement but also the desire to suggest something to somebody else, to convince, to teach, to influence that person and guide his actions. There exist between people so-called volitional relations, which are expressed in the form of orders, instructions, prohibitions, permissions, obedience, disobedience, and so on. Influence on consciousness by means of speech takes place not only in the narrow framework of bilateral communication; it is also exercised on the scale of the social group and of whole countries and humanity in general.

Required reading:

1. Pritchard, Duncan. 2005. Epistemic Luck. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

2. Bayne, T. 2010. The Unity of Consciousness. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

3. Bayne, T. and Montague, M. (eds.) 2012. Cognitive Phenomenology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

4. Gennaro, R. 2012. The Consciousness Paradox. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

5. Koch, C. 2012. Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

6. Kriegel, U. 2009. Subjective Consciousness. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

7. Prinz, J. 2012. The Conscious Brain. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

8. Seigel, S. 2010. The Contents of Visual Experience. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Optional reading:

1. BonJour, Laurence. 2005. “In Defense of the A Priori ”. In Steup and Sosa (eds.) 2005, pp. 98–105.

2. Brewer, Bill. 2005. “Perceptual Experience Has Perceptual Content.” In: Steup and Sosa 2005, pp. 217–230.

3. Hawthorne, John. 2004. Knowledge and Lotteries. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

4. Huemer, Michael. 2000. Skepticism and the Veil of Perception. New York: Rowman and Littlefield.

5. Levine, J. 2001. Purple Haze: The Puzzle of Conscious Experience. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press.

6. Llinas, R. 2001. I of the vortex: from neurons to self. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press

7. Metzinger, T. ed. 2000. Neural Correlates of Consciousness: Empirical and Conceptual Questions. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.