Q&A: Understanding the foundation of the book Truth and Unstable – Knowing the World
Understanding the foundation of the book Truth and Unstable – Knowing the World
Question
Hello,
In your book Truth and Unstable, and also in Two Carts, you present the claim that in order to deal with the vacuum created by the emptiness of the analytic and the lack of inferential ability in the empiricist, one has to arrive at synthetic thinking. This kind of thinking is made up of empiricist and analytic sides—thought and cognition. You are aware that this is a significant innovation and a rather esoteric and puzzling alternative, and therefore you try to justify it in chapter 18.
To tell the truth, I didn’t really manage to understand the way you tried to justify it there, and I’d be glad if you could explain.
As I understand it, you challenge the view that there is only “seeing” with the eyes. After all, the idealists already wondered about that too: how do you know that the eyes really reflect something out there? Rather, you argue that what gives validity to our trust in sight is that same immediate experience of inner certainty that prevails in me regarding what I see. If so, if we have that same feeling of certainty with respect to intuition, why reject it?!
But I didn’t understand the argument from that point onward. The fact that we have a feeling of certainty about the correctness of intuition doesn’t mean that intuition is a cognitive faculty. Maybe these are correct understandings that God implanted in a person? Or an axiom? After all, we have no feeling at all that this is a cognitive faculty—the proof is that you try to prove it using statistical tools. So why assume that it really is such a faculty? Wouldn’t it be better to claim that it’s just an axiom, and that’s it?
Answer
An axiom is a concept that says nothing at all. If it is something arbitrary, then it justifies nothing. If it is not arbitrary, then we have to ask where that axiom came from.
My claim is that intuition is an ability to observe the world not through the senses. The claim that the Holy One, blessed be He, implanted within us the results of the observation does not substantially change the picture, because there is still a factor here that coordinates between what we think and the world. At least de facto, this is observation.
The fact is that we arrive at our insights by means of observations, even though observations alone are not enough to justify them. Therefore it is more reasonable that this is indeed contemplation of the world and not implanted insights. If these were implanted insights, I would expect every person, throughout all of history, to know all of modern science.
Discussion on Answer
Not true. There are things that are clear to me as true, and I would not attack them with a skeptical argument. But if there is a principle that in my eyes too is arbitrary, then it is a legitimate target for skeptical attack.
In my opinion, you actually do feel it that way, but because you are used to cognition being only through the senses, you are convinced that this experience belongs to thought and not to cognition. The fact is that you rely on your intuition as a tool for knowing the world, and that itself means that you see it as a cognitive tool and not merely a thinking one.
Thank you.
B. Or one could say that until today I thought it was a thinking tool, but I made a mistake in reasoning, and therefore it is preferable to abandon all those beliefs.
C. I’m now thinking something completely opposite, and I’d be glad to know whether this is what you meant in your book: if intuition is indeed a cognitive tool, is there any reason at all to assume that I would be able to feel that it is cognitive? After all, the understanding that sight is a cognitive “sense” is not a direct sensation; rather, it comes indirectly as a result of my understanding that the picture I see in my mind is not imagination and illusion, but has an objective connection to reality. And only after that understanding do I call sight a cognitive sense. There isn’t really a feeling that it is a “sense,” only an understanding that accompanies sight that it is a sense. On the other hand, all this feels to me like a confusion of concepts caused by too much philosophizing 🙂
I’ll explain C. As I understand it, you argue that what gives validity to our sight is the feeling that this is the correct description of the state of affairs in the world itself. That same feeling also exists in intuition (and therefore you explain that it is a cognitive tool). I think this is the essence of your philosophical grounding.
But the question you addressed here doesn’t answer at all the question you asked at the beginning—that intuition does not feel to us like a cognitive sense but like a thinking one.
Therefore I think that your claim is that also with regard to the other senses, like sight (perhaps except for the sense of touch), we do not have a “feeling that this is a sense”; rather, we have an understanding that it is a sense—that is, an understanding that what we see is indeed correct (and therefore it is a sense). If so, we can claim the same thing about intuition too, that it is cognitive.
But if in sight I really do have a feeling that it is a sense (and not an understanding), and only in addition to that comes the understanding that sight indeed describes a state of affairs in the world, then you haven’t accomplished anything, given that we have no feeling that intuition is a sense.
?
I stopped because I feel we’re just going in circles. I’ve said what I had to say.
I wanted to know whether I understood correctly what you meant. (Question B was kind of a joke.)
But C, and also the next message—there’s no basis to say that this is just going in circles. Because it’s not a question of an argument. It’s a question of whether I understood correctly the position you are presenting.
I don’t know. I don’t understand what you’re writing, and I explained what I had to explain.
Thank you, but I didn’t understand the part where you claimed that an axiom is arbitrary unless it has a cause. After all, you could always attack any claim with a second-order skeptical argument.
Does the Rabbi have any idea how to explain why I don’t feel and experience intuition as a cognitive act in me, if it really is such? Why do I perceive it as a primary thinking process?