Dr. Seuss and Philosophy - Jacob M. Held [51]
To have experiences upon which to base our knowledge requires that we perceive with our senses and that our minds give meaning and order to that information. Comprehension is the result of these mental concepts mixing with our perceptions, what philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) calls “intuitions.” Our concepts require experiential content on which to work, and that information is gibberish without concepts to order it. According to Kant, “Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.”15 Our concepts can’t be separated from our lived experiences, so this experience shapes and colors our “knowledge.”
(2) [Mainstream epistemologies presume] that the object of knowledge is a natural object known by propositional knowledge, expressed in the form S-knows-that-p.
The form “S-knows-that-p” does capture much of what we call “knowledge”—you know that you are reading, I know that snow is white, the farmer knows that when people have junk they throw it in McElligot’s pool. In fact, a person may not only know something but may also know that she knows it (You know that you know you are reading!). Given this ability to reflect, even if we could list all the things we know, we certainly could never list all the things we know that we know or know that we know that we know or . . . you get the idea.
An epistemology that structures knowledge in this way makes knowledge an all-or-nothing matter: Marco either knows that the residents of Sneeden’s Hotel play croquet or he doesn’t. And yet often our knowledge of the world is partial or “in progress.” One simply doesn’t always have or not have knowledge: a month prior to a recital we might say that the pianist doesn’t know how to play Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. To gain this sort of knowledge requires practice in the first instance and experience in the second. Similarly, brand-new parents may rush their infant to the hospital each time she cries, but those same parents will quickly learn that some kinds of crying are not signaling a medical emergency but rather that the baby is hungry (or just needs a good belch).
(3) [Mainstream epistemologies presume] that objective knowledge is impartial and value free.
We must remember that it’s only within the context of social beings that judgments regarding matters of knowledge can be made. Given we are the sorts of creatures we are, evidence offered to justify a belief is both a matter of discovery and of decision. That we have a gender and are born into a particular socioeconomic class and that we have (or lack) healthy bodies and are the products of unique histories means that our differing values are going to impact our knowledge as well as our theory of knowledge. As the far-from feminist Friedrich Nietzsche puts it in his On the Genealogy of Morals,
Let us, for now on, be on our guard against the hallowed philosophers’ myth of a “pure, will-less, painless, timeless knower”; let us beware of the tentacles of such contradictory notions as “pure reason,” “absolute knowledge,” “absolute intelligence.” All these concepts presuppose an eye such as no living being can imagine, an eye required to have no direction, to abrogate its active and interpretive powers—precisely those powers that alone make seeing, seeing something. All seeing is essentially perspective, and so is all knowing.16
Despite rejecting the idea that knowledge is something impartial and value free, recognizing this social aspect of epistemology may actually increase our chances of gaining objective knowledge. Recognizing that we each have a perspective means that each of these different sets of eyes sees something a little bit differently, and it may be through the integration of these differing bits that we can have objective knowledge. As with the old story from