Chapter 12 Chapter Eleven: Of Intuitive Knowledge

We have a common impression that everything we believe should be provable, or at least can be shown to be highly probable.Many feel that a belief that has no justification is an irrational belief.Generally speaking, this view is correct.Almost all our beliefs can be inferred, if not inferred, from other beliefs which may be regarded as illustrating them.The reason for the inference, however, is usually forgotten, or never consciously brought to our mind.For example, is there any reason to assume that what we are about to eat now will not become poisonous?Very few of us have ever asked ourselves this question.But we feel that, when asked in this way, we can always find perfectly proper reasons for answering, even if no reasons are readily available at the time.Our belief in this usually turns out to be justified.

But let us think of some assertive Socrates who, whatever reason we present to him, always goes on to demand another reason for the reason.It will probably not be long before we go on like this, and sooner or later we will be driven to the point where we can no longer find a further reason, and it is almost certain that it is even theoretically impossible to find a further reason. .Starting from the common beliefs of everyday life, we can be forced back from point to point until we reach some general principle, or a certain instance of a principle, which appears brilliantly self-evident, not itself May be deduced again from anything more self-evident.In the case of most everyday problems, such as whether our food is really nutritious and not poisonous, we can go back to the principle of induction which we have already discussed in Chapter 6.But going backwards from the principle of induction seems to leave no room for regression.The principle itself is something we use all the time when we reason, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously.But all reasoning, so long as it proceeds from simpler self-evident principles, cannot lead us to the principle of induction as its conclusion.The same is true for other logical principles.The truth of logical principles is self-evident to us, and we use it in explaining proofs.But they themselves (or at least some of them) are unverifiable.

Nevertheless, self-evidence is not limited to general principles that cannot be proved.Once many principles of logic are admitted, others can be deduced from them; but the propositions deduced are often as self-evident as those assumed without evidence.Not only that, all arithmetic propositions can also be deduced from the general principles of logic, and simple arithmetic propositions like "2 + 2 = 4" are as self-evident as logical principles. Some ethical principles (such as "we should seek the good") also seem self-evident, although they are open to debate. It should be noted that, as in the case of all general principles, the special cases dealing with familiar things are always more evident than the general principles.For example, the law of contradiction says: Nothing can have a certain property and not have that property at the same time.Once you understand this law, you will know that it is obvious.But it is not so obvious, for example, that a particular rose we see cannot be red and not red at the same time. (Of course it is quite possible that some parts of the rose are red and others are not, or else the rose may be pink, and we simply do not know whether this color can be called red. But in the former case, it is clear that not all roses are red, and in the latter case, as long as we judge according to the precise definition of "red", our answer can be determined immediately in theory. ) Usually we understand general principles by means of particular cases.General principles can be grasped at any time without the aid of examples, as only those who are accustomed to deal with abstractions can do.

Apart from general principles, other self-evident truths are directly derived from the senses.We call such truths "truths of perception," and the judgments expressing them "judgments of perception."But here, considerable care is required to obtain the precise nature of self-evident truths.Actual sense-data are neither true nor false.For example, a particular patch of color that we see does exist: it is not a question of truth or fiction.It is true that there is such a piece, it is true that it has a certain shape and a certain degree of luster, it is true that it is surrounded by several other colors.But the piece itself, like everything else in the world of sense, is not at all in the same class as those that are true or false, and therefore it is not proper to say that it is true.Thus, whatever self-evident truths we may receive from our senses, they must be different from the sense-data they receive from them.

There seem to be two kinds of self-evident truths of perception, though they may converge at the end of the analysis.The first simply asserts the existence of sense-data without any analysis.When we see a piece of red, we judge that "there is such a piece of red", or more strictly speaking, "it is there"; this is an intuitive perceptual judgment.When the object of sensation is complex and we bring it up for some degree of analysis, the second kind of perceptual judgment arises.For example, if we see a round patch of red, we judge, "That red patch is round."This is another perceptual judgment, but it is qualitatively different from the one above.In this judgment, our single sense-data has both color and shape: the color is red, and the shape is round.Our judgment is to separate this material into color and shape, and then combine them by virtue of the statement that red is round.Another example of this type of judgment is: "this is to the right of that", where "this" and "that" can be seen to be seen at the same time.In judgments of this kind, the elements contained in the sense-data are related to one another, and the judgment we pass is the assertion that these elements are in this relation.

Another class of intuitive judgments is that of memory, which is similar to, but quite different from, that of sensation.Since a person's memory of an object can easily also have an image of the object, of which the image is not an integral part, there is a danger of confusion as to the nature of the memory.This is easily seen by noting that the reflection is present and knowing that what is remembered is of the past.Moreover, we can indeed compare our images to a considerable degree with remembered objects, so that we can often tell how accurate our images are, within a fairly wide range.But such a comparison would be impossible, and such a recognition would be impossible, if the object were not opposed to the image, if the object were not somewhere in front of our mind.What constitutes memory, therefore, is not an image, but an object which is said to belong to the past immediately before the mind.If the facts of memory were not in this sense, we would not know that there was a past, and we would know no more about the word "past" than a man born blind knows about the word "light." More.There must therefore be intuitive judgments of memory, and all our knowledge of the past depends essentially on them.

Even so, this condition of memory poses difficulties, because it is very misleading, and thus casts doubt on ordinary intuitive judgments.This difficulty is no small matter.But first let's try to narrow it down as much as possible.In general, the more vivid and recent the experience, the greater the reliability of the memory.If the house next door had been struck by lightning half a minute before, my memory of everything I saw and heard was so reliable that it would be absurd to wonder whether there had been a lightning strike at all.Experiences of a lesser degree are just as reliable and beyond doubt as long as they are recent.I am absolutely certain that I am sitting in the same chair that I was sitting in half a minute ago.As I look back on the day, I see that there are some things of which I am quite sure, some things of which I am almost sure, and others which I can be certain of after thinking about it and recalling all the incidents, but some I can never be sure of things.I'm totally sure I had breakfast this morning.But if I were as indifferent to breakfast as the philosopher, I would be skeptical.As for the conversation at breakfast, some of it I can recall without difficulty, some of it requires some effort, some of which I have to suspect, and some of which I don't recall at all.Everything I remember, therefore, has a series of degrees of self-evidence corresponding to the degree of reliability of my memory.

The first solution, therefore, to the difficult problem of memory errors is this: that memory has a degree of self-evidence, which corresponds to the degree of reliability of the memory, and that the most recent Events that occur and are vividly remembered can be completely reliable to the point of being completely self-evident. Even so, there seem to be instances where there is a firm belief in an entirely false memory.In these cases it is probable that what is really remembered (in the sense that it is immediately before the mind) is not what is believed to be, though it has a general connection with what is believed to be.It was rumored that George the Fourth used to say that he had been at Waterloo, and at last he himself believed it.In this case, what he immediately remembers is his own repetition; the belief (if any) he asserts is produced by associative recall of the assertion, and is therefore not a memory. the real situation.Some cases of memory errors are probably likely to be resolved in such a way that, strictly speaking, it can be seen that they are not the actual situation of memory.

An important point about self-evidence, already made clear by the case of memory, is that self-evidence is graded: it is not a question of whether there is a quality or not, but a question of how much there is in a quality. Questions, on a scale, can range from an absolute certainty to an almost imperceptible miniscule.Truths of perception, and certain principles of logic, have an extremely high degree of self-evidence; truths of immediate memory, almost as high; principles of induction, less self-evident than some other principles of logic, This is the case, for example, in contrast to "everything that follows from true premises must be true."The self-evidence decreases progressively as memories become more distant and vague; logical and mathematical truths become less self-evident (roughly speaking) as they become more complex.Judgments about intrinsic ethical or aesthetic value may be somewhat self-evident, but not much.

In epistemology, the degree of self-evidence is important, because since propositions that are not true can (it seems possible) have some degree of self-evidence, there is no need to abandon all relations between self-evidence and truth, and only It needs to be said: when there is a conflict, the propositions that are more self-evident should be retained and the ones that are not self-evident should be discarded. From what has been said, however, it seems very probable that in self-evidence two different concepts are combined: one of which corresponds to the highest degree of self-evidence, which is in fact the guarantee of the infallibility of truth; As with all other degrees of self-evidence, it therefore offers no guarantee of infallibility, but is merely a more or less presumption.However, this is only a formulation, and now we cannot further develop it.After solving the problem of the nature of truth, we shall return to the problem of self-evidence, which has to do with the problem of distinguishing knowledge from error.