Chapter 9 of Man’s Knowledge of Reality deals with the psychological-anthropological
principles of human knowing.
Here we will discuss the first four sections, pages 90-95.
Wilhelmsen here looks at the causal processes involved in the production of human knowledge:
what processes happen in our minds when we move from ignorance to knowledge about something?
The only realist answer to this question, he says, involves the doctrine that the things
known are the cause of my knowing them.
We begin by referring back to occasionalism,
the late medieval/early modern view that God causes human knowledge, because things lack
the power to make themselves known without God’s action.
Wilhelmsen coins the term “irrelevant realism” here, which I think works well.
Under occasionalism, we know real things, but their real existence is irrelevant to
our knowledge of them, since we would and could know them just the same if they did
not exist.
The difficulty with occasionalism, as we have said before, is that it gives a cause of knowledge
that is much stronger than it needs to be, perhaps in response to the hollowing out of
early modern conceptions of being.
To avoid occasionalist errors, we need to
keep in mind the distinction between intramental (or just mental) existence and intentional existence.
When we reject copy theory, we can still leave ourselves open to the mistake of conflating
intramental and intentional.
The mistaken line of reasoning goes this way: Existence in the mind is distinct from existence
in reality; they are two different things.
On what basis then, do you conclude the latter from the former?
In response, Wilhelmsen reminds us that we must not think of knowledge as a purely
inside-the-mind event.
It involves more than intramental existence, because knowledge intends a reality that is
not itself, it bridges the gap between subject and object.
This is because knowledge as such is relational.
It connects the knower and the known through the known thing’s act of existing.
Thus, to know a being is to know it as existing.
The passage on page 92-93 is important, so please read it carefully.
The upshot is this: consider a known being, call it B. B has both a subjective act of
existing, as it is in itself, as a subject.
B also has an objective, for-others, act of existing, as it is presented to and known
by knowing minds outside itself.
B’s act of existing-for-others as an object “issues from and terminates in” B’s
subjective act of being-a-subject.
Thus knowledge of being is caused by the being known.
The knowledge that Michael has of B is caused by the being of B, present intentionally in
Michael’s mind.
The next two sections will focus on the principles of knowledge causation: a thing acts as it
is, and in being known it is present to the thing it acts on.
A fundamental principle of action is that
action is proportional to being.
No being means no action, and infinite being means infinite action.
In between, finite beings act finitely, through the combination of existence and form.
The latter limits and gives definite boundaries to the former.
A being presents itself through its actions
to other beings.
This is a second presence, going beyond its own presence-to-itself.
Acting things relate themselves to other things by acting on them.
The acting being is present to another being both formally (as what it is) and existentially
(by its act of existing).
The action that connects beings to other beings is transitive, not immanent.
Immanent action terminates within and is perfected within the acting being; Wilhelmsen’s example
is unexpressed love.
Transitive action reaches into a being outside the agent, and fulfills some capacity in it.
This is the re-presence of the acting being, existentially and formally present to another being.
Wilhelmsen ends section 4 by promising us a review of the steps involved in cognition,
in section 5. We will look at that next.
Thanks for watching today; goodbye.