Kant and Foundationalism

According to Kant, all human experience minimally involves the use of empirical concepts. We don’t have access to anything like the raw sense data posited by many early 20th century logical empiricists, and it would not be of much use if we did. In Kantian terms, this would be a form of intuition without concepts, which he famously characterized as necessarily blind, and unable to function on its own.

Foundationalism is the notion that there is certain knowledge that does not depend on any inference. This implies that it somehow comes to us ready-made. But for Kant, all use of empirical concepts involves a kind of synthesis that could not work without low-level inference, so this is impossible.

The idea that any knowledge could come to us ready-made involves what Kant called dogmatism. According to Kant, this should have no place in philosophy. Actual knowledge necessarily is a product of actual work, though some of that work is normally implicit or preconscious. (See also Kantian Discipline; Interpretation; Inferentialism vs Mentalism.)

It also seems to me that foundationalism is incompatible with the Kantian autonomy of reason.

Aristotelian and Hegelian Dialectic

When Hegel talked about dialectic instead of just using it, he occasionally made it sound as if dialectic governed events in the world. This is a loose, popular way of speaking that should not be taken literally. Dialectic is the main tool of the forward progress of philosophical criticism, and thus indirectly helps refine our understanding of the world and events in it. It could not directly drive events.

It is actually very hard to draw a sharp line between the world “in itself” and our understanding of it, because our understanding (in the general, not the specifically Hegelian sense) is all we actually have to go on. Our sense of the world in itself is permeated by artifacts of our understanding, because it comes entirely from our understanding.

But then it turns out that our understanding is not just some private, subjective thing of ours. Our understanding participates in the world, and is part of it. The cultivation of shareable thought grounds objectivity in (our sense of) the world. Much of the content of shareable thought comes to us from outside. In a poetic manner of speaking, it could be said that the world thinks itself through us. But in a more direct way, we are the agents and stewards of the world’s thought. In particular, it advances through us. There is thus no wall between our understanding and the world. There is a meaningful distinction, but the content of shareable thought straddles the boundary, so to speak.

Aristotle’s version of dialectic is much less famous nowadays, but a great deal easier to understand, and it does not require apologetics of the sort I just provided for Hegel’s. It uses logic and semantics to analyze the meaning of things said, making no assumption whether or not they are grounded in knowledge.

Aristotle explicitly said (Topics, book 1) that this is the way to investigate first principles (i.e., starting points) of knowledge. With respect to such starting points, we have no possibility of knowledge in the strong sense (episteme) — which requires development — but only a kind of initial personal acquaintance or familiarity (gnosis), as he said in Posterior Analytics.

There has been a strong tradition of misinterpretation of this latter passage. With no textual basis, many people who wanted to read Stoic-style foundationalism back into Aristotle — or were influenced by others with this sort of motivation — have glossed Aristotelian gnosis as something like a strong intellectual intuition, and claimed Aristotle was saying first principles of knowledge were better known in a strong sense, rather than just more familiar. (See also Aristotelian Demonstration.)

Aristotle’s actual practice, however, confirms the reading of first principles of knowledge as themselves objects of mere familiarity rather than strong knowledge. (Aristotle’s loftier principles are ends, not starting points of knowledge, and he typically places discussion of them at the end of an inquiry.) His starting points for inquiries are very pragmatic. He typically begins an inquiry with logical/semantic (i.e., “dialectical”) analysis of widely known opinions on the subject. He also explicitly recommends that we begin any inquiry from what is closer to us, and then, through analysis, refine our understanding. (See also The Epistemic Modesty of Plato and Aristotle).

The development of knowledge starts from what is close to us and easier to grasp, and becomes progressively more secure through the dialectical work we do on it. Aristotelian dialectic uses the same logical forms as demonstration, but is mainly concerned with inferential semantic analysis rather than deriving conclusions. (Even Aristotelian demonstration is concerned not so much with deriving conclusions, as with perspicuously showing their basis.) Aristotle does the great majority of his actual work with dialectic rather than demonstration.

Once one becomes familiar with the profile of the Aristotelian version, it becomes possible to see something very like it at the core of Hegel’s way of working — not so much in what he says about it, as in what he does. (See also Essence and Concept; Aristotelian Dialectic; Dialogue; Scholastic Dialectic; Contradiction vs Polarity; Three Logical Moments.)

The Epistemic Modesty of Plato and Aristotle

In his lectures on the history of philosophy, Hegel said that beyond all others, Plato and Aristotle deserve the title of educators of the human race. A big part of what makes this true is what I will call their epistemic modesty. In contrast to the sweeping and very strong claims of many later philosophers, Plato and Aristotle were both masters of careful understatement.

Plato developed a very sharp contrast between knowledge and opinion. No opinion counts as knowledge, period. Arguments from authority or tradition may yield true conclusions, but if so it is not the authority or tradition that makes them true. To assert anything at all is implicitly to take responsibility for the assertion, and therefore to invite dialogue. For Plato, there is no knowledge in the strict sense (episteme) of anything that becomes. The most important component of wisdom is knowing what we do not know. Plato’s great literary homage to Socrates makes the latter a moral hero whose honest pursuit of truth got him executed, when his only real offense was embarrassing powerful people with questions they could not answer without admitting that they could not justify their positions. Some of his later students in the New Academy even pushed Plato’s epistemic modesty to the point of generalized skepticism.

Aristotle said that to know something (episteme) is to be able to give adequate reasons why it is true. Many things initially seem clear to us from intuition or opinions we have learned to accept, but this is only an apparent clarity. No immediate awareness counts as knowledge. We should treat the opinions of the wise with respect but, as with Plato, opinion can never be knowledge.

This last is a bit controversial, due to traditional interpretations of language in the Posterior Analytics about presuppositions and first premises. Aristotle recognized that you cannot rigorously prove anything without some starting point. But he explicitly uses a different word for knowledge (gnosis) to say we start from premises that we are better acquainted with, and work toward conclusions we are less well acquainted with. This is appropriate, because in modern terms his description of episteme in part makes it a function from premises to conclusions, but here he is talking about a beginning. One episteme (“science”) may prove premises of another, yielding episteme on a larger scale via a sort of function composition, but we still have to begin somewhere.

Aristotle is very keen to make distinctions, and to point out when the same word is “said in many ways”. Here he just uses a different, more informal word (gnosis) that typically has a connotation of personal acquaintance, as opposed to the technical concept of episteme. Unfortunately, Posterior Analytics often seems to have been read as meaning or implying that immediately accepted premises can be more certain than the reasoned conclusions. But there is no textual evidence that Aristotle considers gnosis to be in any way more certain than episteme. The imputation of an argument about certainty to Aristotle at this location rests on a circular assumption that certainty is required here. That sort of thinking belongs to a foundationalism that is utterly foreign to Aristotle. The only kind of necessity Aristotle recognizes is what Leibniz called hypothetical necessity, which is the if-then variety. At the beginning of the Topics, Aristotle explicitly says it is what he calls dialectic that evaluates first premises. Even though it employs the same structures of necessary reasoning as episteme or “science”, dialectic is expressly said to yield only “probable” conclusions (precisely because first premises are inherently uncertain). (See also Aristotelian Demonstration; Aristotelian Dialectic; Belief.)

The misinterpretation of Aristotle on first premises is partly due to the influence of Stoicism on nearly all Western philosophy after Aristotle. Stoicism is fascinating and original in its own right, but where Plato and Aristotle cultivated epistemic modesty and left many questions open, the Stoics claimed to have all the answers, to have unproblematic direct access to reality, and to have formulated it all in a complete, final system. Stoicism was the first philosophy to have significant diffusion in society at large. This was possible in part because overly strong, reassuring claims made for easier marketing. The dogmatism denounced by Kant did not actually infect all previous philosophy as Kant implied, but it was extremely influential, and Stoicism was its most important historical source. (See also Stoicism and Skepticism.)