P::::::::::::41
Reasoning as giving us no new information (an ancient commonplace), and quite a different one to say that it is, like music, and activity. Similarly, it is one thing to warn against confusing the causes of things with their definitions, or facts with symbols (which nominalists had done even before Occam), and much more startling to suppose, as Vico did, that formal sciences, like mathematics or logic, are not forms of discovery at all but of invention so that if they are to be called true and false, it must be in a sense widely different from that in which these words are applied to statements
III
Vico’s next large step was a thesis which undermined the accepted division of all knowledge into three kinds: metaphysical or theological, that is, based on rational intuition or faith or revelation; deductive, as in logic or grammar or mathematics; and perceptual, based on empirical observation, refined and extended by hypotheses, experiment, induction, and the other methods of the natural sciences. There exists, for him, yet another type of awareness, unlike a priori knowledge in that it is empirical, unlike deduction in that it yields new knowledge of facts, and unlike perception of the external world in that it informs us not merely of what exists or occurs, and in what spatial or temporal order, but also why what is, or occurs, is as it is – that is, in some sense percaussas this species is self-knowledge: knowledge of activities of which we, the knowing subjects, are ourselves the authors, endowed with motives, purposes and a continuous social life, which we understand, as it were, from inside. Here and only here we are not passive observers looking on from the outside, as when we contemplate the external world, where all that we can see are events, or the ‘surfaces’ of things about the inner lives or goals of which – or whether, indeed, they have, or in principle could be said to have, goals or inner lives – we can only darkly speculate.
In the case of the external world the naturalists are right: all that we know is based on what the senses report. We can classify their
P::::::::::::42
Contents into regular uniformities, apply mathematical techniques, decompose them into smaller parts, re-combine them, but the result of our investigations will be no more than a report of what stands in that spatial relation to what, or what follows, or is simultaneous with, what else. Yet to say that this is all we can know about human beings, and that the techniques of our ways of apprehending the external world are, therefore, all that we can use in learning about each other, would be a grave understatement, a denial of what we know to be true. In the case of human behavior we can surely ask why men act as they do; ask not merely what mental states or event, for example feelings or volitions, are followed by what acts, but also why; not only whether, but also why, persons in this or that mental or emotional state are or are not likely to behave in a given fashion, what is, or what would be, rational or desirable or right for them to do, how and why they decide between various courses of action, and so on. In short, we judge human activity in terms of purposes, motives, acts of will, decisions, doubts, hesitations thoughts, hopes, fears, desires and so forth; these are among the ways in which we distinguish human beings from the rest of nature we expect to obtain answers, less or more satisfactory, to such questions. To conceive of non-human nature in such terms is irrational: a misapplication of categories, called anthropomorphism or animism, characteristic of primitive times, the ages of ‘the Gods’ or of ‘the heroes’, or, when it was used by poets in more sophisticated times, liable to be called the pathetic fallacy.
These things were affirmed by Vico before Herder and the romantics made them their own. There are adumbrations of this position in the Italian Renaissance, particularly among the Neoplatonists, and in French historiography in the sixteenth century, but they are no more than adumbrations. No one before Vico declared that if our knowledge is not demonstrative in the way in which mathematics (or divine omniscience) is so, neither is it that of perception or the natural sciences, based on the senses, as our knowledge of material objects or plants and animals must be. We can perceive and describe a table, a tree, an ant, accumulate information about their behavior, establish laws such as those of physics, botany, entomology and so on, but all this, even at its fullest, will tell us only what it is to look like a table, a tree, and ant, or to move, or be causally affected, like one what we still cannot tell is what it is like to be a table, a tree, an ant, in the sense in
P::::::::::::41Reasoning as giving us no new information (an ancient commonplace), and quite a different one to say that it is, like music, and activity. Similarly, it is one thing to warn against confusing the causes of things with their definitions, or facts with symbols (which nominalists had done even before Occam), and much more startling to suppose, as Vico did, that formal sciences, like mathematics or logic, are not forms of discovery at all but of invention so that if they are to be called true and false, it must be in a sense widely different from that in which these words are applied to statementsIIIVico’s next large step was a thesis which undermined the accepted division of all knowledge into three kinds: metaphysical or theological, that is, based on rational intuition or faith or revelation; deductive, as in logic or grammar or mathematics; and perceptual, based on empirical observation, refined and extended by hypotheses, experiment, induction, and the other methods of the natural sciences. There exists, for him, yet another type of awareness, unlike a priori knowledge in that it is empirical, unlike deduction in that it yields new knowledge of facts, and unlike perception of the external world in that it informs us not merely of what exists or occurs, and in what spatial or temporal order, but also why what is, or occurs, is as it is – that is, in some sense percaussas this species is self-knowledge: knowledge of activities of which we, the knowing subjects, are ourselves the authors, endowed with motives, purposes and a continuous social life, which we understand, as it were, from inside. Here and only here we are not passive observers looking on from the outside, as when we contemplate the external world, where all that we can see are events, or the ‘surfaces’ of things about the inner lives or goals of which – or whether, indeed, they have, or in principle could be said to have, goals or inner lives – we can only darkly speculate. In the case of the external world the naturalists are right: all that we know is based on what the senses report. We can classify their
P::::::::::::42
Contents into regular uniformities, apply mathematical techniques, decompose them into smaller parts, re-combine them, but the result of our investigations will be no more than a report of what stands in that spatial relation to what, or what follows, or is simultaneous with, what else. Yet to say that this is all we can know about human beings, and that the techniques of our ways of apprehending the external world are, therefore, all that we can use in learning about each other, would be a grave understatement, a denial of what we know to be true. In the case of human behavior we can surely ask why men act as they do; ask not merely what mental states or event, for example feelings or volitions, are followed by what acts, but also why; not only whether, but also why, persons in this or that mental or emotional state are or are not likely to behave in a given fashion, what is, or what would be, rational or desirable or right for them to do, how and why they decide between various courses of action, and so on. In short, we judge human activity in terms of purposes, motives, acts of will, decisions, doubts, hesitations thoughts, hopes, fears, desires and so forth; these are among the ways in which we distinguish human beings from the rest of nature we expect to obtain answers, less or more satisfactory, to such questions. To conceive of non-human nature in such terms is irrational: a misapplication of categories, called anthropomorphism or animism, characteristic of primitive times, the ages of ‘the Gods’ or of ‘the heroes’, or, when it was used by poets in more sophisticated times, liable to be called the pathetic fallacy.
These things were affirmed by Vico before Herder and the romantics made them their own. There are adumbrations of this position in the Italian Renaissance, particularly among the Neoplatonists, and in French historiography in the sixteenth century, but they are no more than adumbrations. No one before Vico declared that if our knowledge is not demonstrative in the way in which mathematics (or divine omniscience) is so, neither is it that of perception or the natural sciences, based on the senses, as our knowledge of material objects or plants and animals must be. We can perceive and describe a table, a tree, an ant, accumulate information about their behavior, establish laws such as those of physics, botany, entomology and so on, but all this, even at its fullest, will tell us only what it is to look like a table, a tree, and ant, or to move, or be causally affected, like one what we still cannot tell is what it is like to be a table, a tree, an ant, in the sense in
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