On myself, knowledge, understanding, ontology, metaphysics, beauty and the sublime
A philosophical introduction
The blog and myself
I recently talked to someone about what I write on here, and they told me that, more often than not, they didn’t follow what I was saying. This makes complete sense, since the essays on here are written for own sake. Mostly, I am trying to write the essays that I would like to read if they were posted somewhere else, but this means that they are aimed at someone with my educational background and interests, which basically narrows it down to a handful of people in this country. This essay will serve a somewhat different purpose to what I usually write, in that it will be an introduction of myself, as well as some bits of philosophical thinking that I think is fundamental.
I started this blog because I was frustrated with applying for PhD-positions and working on an academic article on my own. I graduated the Master’s program in philosophy at Aarhus University three years ago, and in that time I applied to positions in and outside of Denmark with little luck, while working jobs that were unrelated to my education, most of which were exhausting. This is not to say that it was all bad, but it left me with little time and energy to put into actually making something good. For about two years I was spinning my wheels without getting anywhere, all the while keeping an increasing collection of notes on topics that I found interesting.
I just want to actually write things that I enjoy and to communicate my thoughts to other people, and that’s why I don’t put any references or footnotes in these essays - I don’t want to make any intimations towards impartiality or due diligence, just produce somewhat complete expressions of the things I like to think about. In this essay, however, I want to provide a more approachable introduction to some basic philosophical terminology and explain how I use it in my own thinking. I hope that it all makes sense, and that people can use it as a starting point for the rest of the stuff on here.
Knowledge and understanding
The first bit of terminology, which is really very fundamental, is the distinction between knowledge and understanding. The classical definition of knowledge is a justified, true belief. Unpacking this, a belief is a statement that I take to be true, i.e. that the sky is blue. For me to know that the sky is blue, I would have to be justified in this belief, so I would need to have come to this belief in a reliable way, such as going outside and looking. Lastly, for this justified belief to count as knowledge, it needs to actually be true. In our example, this means that the sky would actually have to be blue. Understanding, on the other hand, is the ability to give explanations. This often takes the form of answering questions about proposition, such as “why is the sky blue?” If I understand that the sky is blue, I would be able to answer this question by explaining how the high pressure of the air means that there are no clouds, or the way that certain colors of light are scattered in the atmosphere, or how blue light is registered in the eye in a way that is processed by the brain to give the impression of a blue sky. From these examples, we can see that the same phenomenon or state of affairs can be explained in different ways. These explanations are all different ways of understanding that the sky is blue, and I might need to specify in my question that I am asking for one rather than the other.
Now, we usually think of knowledge and understanding as “hanging together,” but I want to emphasize that this is not the case more often than we expect. When we say that we are justified in believing a proposition, this is where we often introduce an aspect of understanding, but this is not necessary. The justification has to do with how we came about our belief, and although this has to be reliable in some sense, it does not have to involve our understanding it. One example is knowledge gained from scientific methods, which is the gold-standard of the kind of reliability that is involved in the production of knowledge. However, many scientific fields are either too complex for us to be able to get a proper understanding of, or they simply appear completely incomprehensible - think of the dizzying complexity of biological systems or the paradoxes of quantum physics. Whether we understand what is going on, whether we are able to explain it and answer questions about how it hangs together with other stuff, is inconsequential to our ability to perform experiments that reliably get at the truth. There are many cases, where we are faced with knowledge of a fact that we do not understand, that we cannot decisively relate to other facts in a way that makes sense to us. This is also what is happening when people like Slavoj Žižek speak about the ability to lie by using the truth: we are often confronted by statistics that show objectively true correlations, but which have been selected such that they obscure the way that they present things as hanging together - the contingent understanding of the subject matter that is smuggled in with the points of knowledge.
The other side of this split is the notion of understandings that have nothing to do with any true matter of fact. The experience of gaining understanding is compelling, and it is a big part of what motivated me to study philosophy. However, as I have emphasized, understanding and knowledge do not necessarily go hand in hand, and we should be mindful that the thrill of understanding is not mistaken for gaining knowledge, for getting at the truth of matters of fact. Browse through any community that is centered around cultural discussions on the internet, and you will find no shortage of people speaking in terms of truth and knowledge, and this is mostly harmless. However, so many of us live in a world that is becoming increasingly hard to understand, and finding an angle on it that allows one to explain and understand what is going on can be a great relief. How many people have not succumbed to conspiracy theories in recent times for exactly this reason? However, this also opens up the possibility of exploring different ways of explanation, submitting them to logical analysis and playing with all of the different ways that they can hang together.
We have already opened a philosophical can of worms simply by introducing either of these concepts. The classical definition of knowledge works fine for most purposes, but it has generally not been accepted among philosophers since Edmund Gettier undermined it in 1963. He did this by giving a counter-example: Smith and Jones have both applied for a job, and Smith has been told by the company’s president that Jones will get the job. He also knows that Jones has ten coins in his pocket, and he therefore believes the proposition “the person who gets the job has ten coins in his pocket”. However, Smith himself has ten coins in his pocket, at it is him, not Jones, who gets the job. This case fits the JTB definition: Smith is justified in believing the proposition, and it turned out to be true. However, we would not say that he thereby knew it. After Gettier made his initial attack, a veritable cottage industry sprang up, producing a plethora of examples to meet any objection and explore any possibility - suffice it to say that the classical definition of knowledge has been put away decisively, and that truth has shown itself to be a far more complex concept than previously thought.
Ontology and metaphysics
The distinction between ontology and metaphysics as philosophical disciplines is also in principle straightforward, but I remember being unsure of it for a good while during my studies. It also doesn't help that this difference is either glossed over in current literature, if not ignored outright. This distinction tracks the previous one between knowledge and understanding. As a first approximation, metaphysics is broadly the philosophical discipline that deals with the object of knowledge, and ontology is the discipline that deals with the object of understanding. We saw in the definition of knowledge that there is an element of justification, and there is a big overlap with epistemology here, but this mainly deals with the relations between beliefs. To be more precise, metaphysics deals with truth, and ontology deals with truth-makers, the entities that true beliefs are about.
Metaphysics has historically been the hallmark of philosophy, and simultaneously the activity that philosophers have been derided for the most often. It is the one point where philosophers try to do what the sciences are supposed to do, namely to say something about what is true, what could possibly be true and what necessarily must be true. Where philosophy differs from the sciences is its method, the almost exclusive reliance on pure argumentation. Metaphysics has historically been philosophers trying to determine the nature of reality without ever going out and actually having a look at it. This is the paradigmatic vision of armchair philosophy. When philosophers at the start of the 20th century decided to prioritize the role of science in our knowledge of the world, it should be no surprise that metaphysics quickly became a dirty word, at least in analytical philosophy. It has mostly remained like this since, with a couple of sporadic exceptions. I mentioned that ontology and metaphysics are often conflated, and this stems from people working on topics like epistemology and philosophy of science not feeling like they need to be as mindful of the distinction anymore. Whether the practice of metaphysics proper is even meaningful is still a very contentious subject.
Ontology is the study of ways of explanation. By this, I mean that we try to figure out how different kinds of things could hang together. This means looking at how we think about the truth-makers that we appeal to in our explanations, such as objects, fields, processes, tropes, actions and persons. When we construct an ontology of a specific subject matter, we take a look at the kinds of things that it talks about, and model them as being these kinds of entities. For example, an ontology of quantum physics might look at how all fundamental particles in principle can be treated as a collection of fundamental properties, and choose a bundle theory of tropes to be the best model. Another example might be the question of how to model biological systems and entities. Whether these should be seen as mechanistic objects or complex processes is an open problem in contemporary philosophy. My friend Sebastian is currently researching a PhD in Oslo on a topic related to exactly this problem.
When philosophers work academically on ontology, they are usually trying to get clear on how to model the inferences of scientific theories. By this, we are trying to find the structure that relates the factual statements of the theories. A theory, considered in this context, is nothing more than a list of propositions about the world, about what is and would be true in certain situations. However, there is also a lot of extra stuff in scientific theories, such as how to imagine what is going on in those sciences that deal with unobservable phenomena. Philosophers try to investigate the way that these statements are interpreted and what inferences they license. This is often a lot harder and more complicated than it sounds or, frankly, than even many academics are willing to admit. Most people working with scientific theories reach a point, where they are content with merely using the methods and theories that they know to work. My high school math teacher put it best: “Math is not something you understand, it is something you get used to.”
When Gettier made his challenge to the received notion of knowledge, he did so by imagining scenarios that fit the classical definition of knowledge, but that we would not intuitively call knowledge. He thus showed that the way that we intuitively use the concept of truth is not modelled by JTB - specifically, that JTB is too wide of a model, it includes cases that are outside of our intuitions about truth. He thus did the exact same kind of conceptual analysis on the concept of truth as people working in ontology try to do on scientific concepts. However, Gettiers accomplishment is impressive both because of his ability to get at a deep problem with such a fundamental concept in such an elegant way, but also because this kind of work is so exceedingly rare. We almost never start from such clear notions, and philosophical analysis almost never looks as clean and decisive as this. Today, ontology deals much more with looking at how technical terms are used in different contexts, trying to find similarities or points of discontinuity that might indicate the boundaries of concepts that can eventually be modelled.
Beauty and the sublime
The last bit of philosophical terminology that I want to introduce are the concepts of the beautiful and the sublime. This is very important for the way that I think about art, experience, and other people, and it necessitates that I introduce a bit of Kantian vocabulary. Kants central contribution to philosophy is his constructionist model of what he in German called “Erkenntnis”, which in Danish is rendered as “erkendelse”, and which does not have a good counterpart in English, where “cognition” and “experience” are often used, in a broad sense signaling the introduction of something into consciousness. Kant claimed that cognition is made up of two aspect namely “Anschauung”, which is rendered in Danish as “anskuelse” and in English as “intuition” (again for lack of a better counterpart), and “Begriff”, rendered in Danish as “begreb” and in English as “concept”. And intuition is supplied by the senses, and corresponds roughly to the sense data of the empiricists. However, Kant argued that these were insufficient to constitute cognition, and that they needed to be paired up with a concept, provided by the mind, in order to separate the flow of sense experience into recognizable bits. This part of the mind, which divides the sensible world up into the constituents of cognition, is what Kant termed “the understanding.” In his first critique, “Critique of Pure Reason,” Kant insisted that no cognition could exist, which was not simultaneously an intuition and a concept. However, by the time of his third critique, “Critique of Judgment,” Kant seemed to have softened on this stance, evidenced by his introduction of two new concepts, namely beauty and the sublime.
In beauty, an impression affects us in a way that we are unable to put to words, it slips past our conceptual guard, and produces a non-conceptual understanding. Kant described this as provoking the free play of the imagination and understanding, letting the mind try to mix and match it with other concepts and intuitions. A sublime experience, however, evokes a concept that one cannot understand, because it cannot be paired with an intuition of the object to which it applies. This provokes a never-ending series of new concepts to be called upon, to lend their intuitive support to try and produce an intuition that is adequate to the sublime concept. In strict Kantian parlance, the oft-used phrase “sublime beauty” does not really make sense. It essentially designates something which is fails to connect to both an intuition and a concepts. It is hard to see how this is not just something that fails entirely to even enter into consciousness.
The question of how the new is produced is a central problem for Kant and the entire western canon that followed. In the first critique, his answer was to argue for the possibility of “synthetic a priori judgments,” contra to Hume and the empiricists that preceded him. The third critique shows how the understanding encounters its own limitation through the beautiful and the sublime, setting into motion the process of generating new ways of understanding, albeit in totally different ways. Beauty instantiates a closeness that is nearer than what our conceptual apparatus would admit, and we thus experience the infiltration of a truth that we have not yet assimilated in our understanding. Sublimity, on the other hand, instantiates a distance that we cannot bridge with any known experience, and we experience the inadequacy of our ability to envisage (anschauen) it. One of the major challenges of philosophy is to get at these experiences, and to use them as starting points for the development of new concepts. To accomplish this, it is my belief that philosophy cannot act as the final arbiter of truth or good and proper use of language, but that it instead needs to see itself as one among many discourses - science, art, lived experience - that each try to reveal the truth of the world in each their own way.