We now come to intellectual knowledge. This is distinctly 'human' knowledge appears in three phases: ideas, judgments and inferences. We are not concerned here with the nature of the intellect as such; we are interested in its knowledge as found in these three products of mental activity. Whatever we may think of their validity and truth, we cannot seriously doubt that we have ideas and judgments and inferences. They are facts, and they lie at the very core of the problem of knowledge.
An idea is the intellectual representation of a thing. My idea of a thing is very different from my sense-perception of that thing. For example: As I walk along, I see a man. He is white of skin, six feet two inches in height, with black eyes and black hair, slim but muscular, and a slight limp gives him a somewhat halting gait. He wears a cap, a brown suit, a gray topcoat, blue socks, and black oxfords. This is the picture of an individual human being as he meets the eye and is perceived by the sense of sight. But my 'idea' of this man is that he is a 'bodily, living, sentient, rational substance'; in other words, this man is a 'rational animal.' The sense perceives him in all his concrete individuality, with all the peculiar traits and characteristics which make him to be this man and differentiate him from every other human being. My 'idea' however, apprehends him in those essential attributes which he has in common with all other human beings, leaving aside all the individualizing and differentiating marks peculiar to himself. Sense-perception, therefore, represents man in the concrete; the idea represents him in the abstract.
Passing on to the judgments of the intellect, we find that a judgment is an act of the mind affirming or denying one idea of another. Three factors are involved in the making of a judgment:
· Two ideas which are known
· The mutual comparison of these two ideas
· The mental pronouncement of their agreement or disagreement
The intellect, for instance, consciously apprehends and compares the ideas 'tree' and 'plant'; it finds that they agree; then it pronounces this agreement in the judgment, 'The tree is a plant.' But on comparing the ideas 'tree' and 'animal,' the intellect perceives that they do not agree and them makes the pronouncement, 'The tree is not an animal.' If my assertion (affirmation or denial) in the judgment is correctly made, it is a true judgment, that it contains truth or error, which makes the judgment such an important element in the problem of knowledge. Internal and external sense-perceptions present or represent things concretely, and ideas represent the essence of things abstractly; but judgments claim to express the truth about reality as it actually is in itself. When I say, 'This man is an Indian,' I mean to assert that he really is an Indian; I certainly do not intend to convey the impression that I am merely combining the two ideas 'this man' and 'Indian' in my mind. In fact, the ordinary man never adverts to the fact that his judgment consists of a 'subject' and a 'predicate' and a 'copula'; for him his judgments simply express reality as he sees and knows it to be, and he is certain that his judgments do actually represent reality.
The same is true of inferences. The mind does not always perceive the agreement or disagreement between two ideas by a direct comparison of the two, so that it can make an immediate judgment about them. That 'Two plus two are four' I know from a mere analysis of these ideas, and that 'The sun is shining' I know by opening my eyes and looking at the sky; but that 'The human soul is a spirit' is something I can neither see with my eyes nor perceive by a direct comparison of these two ideas. If, however, I can bring in a third known idea with which, upon comparison, I find the two ideas to agree, then I am justified in saying that these two ideas agree with each other. This is inference or reasoning; and it is defined as the mental process by which, from certain truths already known, the mind passes to another truth distinct from these but necessarily following from them. That man reasons and makes inferences of this kind, is a fact of everyday experience. And man is convinced that these inferences, since they consist of judgments and lead to a final judgment, are a valid form of knowledge and contain truth regarding reality as it is. Whenever people argue among themselves about facts and events, about politics or religion or science or sports or anything else, it is always with conviction that these arguments can lead them to truth and valid knowledge. The deductive reasoning of mathematics and the inductive processes of the experimental sciences are all based on this assumption.
Man possesses also intellectual consciousness. He is aware of the intellectual acts of apprehension (ideas), judgments and reasoning, and also of other states and acts of his being, as love, hatred, sorrow, happiness, volition. Furthermore, man is conscious of self, of his own Ego, in the acts of thinking, willing and sense-perceiving, and he recognizes his own self as the subject of these acts, the agent who performs them and in whom they occur. He is also aware that these acts in their varying forms differ among themselves, while he, in whom they take place and in whom they inhere as their subject, is one and indivisible. These facts are expressed by him in phrases like the following: 'I think,' 'I will,' 'I see,' 'I was angry,' 'I walk,' 'I am aware of myself.' These judgments show that man realizes that he consists of a body as well as of a mind and that these are different entities belonging to the same Ego. They also show that his Ego persists as an unchanging, permanent reality amid all the changing acts and states which come and go within his person. Finally, man perceives that, while his body is a part of his Ego, there are other bodies which do not belong to his Ego; there is, therefore, a world or universe distinct from his Ego, with an existence and reality of its own.
Such are the undeniable spontaneous convictions of man as manifested by his conscious states and expressed in his judgments.
Coming up next on Epistemology Today blog:
Epistemological Classes of Truth
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