“Epistemology Without a Knowing Subject”, 1968 (; backlinks):
This chapter presents the author’s view on epistemology. This chapter introduces the author’s various theses, and his explanation of the third world and the world of objective contents of thought, especially of scientific and poetic thoughts and of works of art.
A biological approach to the third world is provided in the chapter to defend the existence of an autonomous world by a kind of biological or evolutionary argument. The chapter illustrates the objectivity and the autonomy of this third world. With the evolution of the argumentative function of language, criticism becomes the main instrument of further growth. The autonomous world of the higher functions of language becomes the world of science.
The chapter provides an appreciation and criticism of L. E. J. Brouwer’s epistemology and discusses the logic and the biology of discovery. It presents the concept of discovery, humanism, and self-transcendence.
…To sum up, although the meaning of ‘knowledge’, like of all words, is unimportant, it is important to distinguish between different senses of the word:
Subjective knowledge which consists of certain inborn dispositions to act, and of their acquired modifications.
Objective knowledge, for example, scientific knowledge which consists of conjectural theories, open problems, problem situations, and arguments.
All work in science is work directed towards the growth of objective knowledge. We are workers who are adding to the growth of objective knowledge as masons work on a cathedral.
Our work is fallible, like all human work. We constantly make mistakes, and there are objective standards of which we may fall short—standards of truth, content, validity, and others.
Language, the formulation of problems, the emergence of new problem situations, competing theories, mutual criticism by way of argument, all these are the indispensable means of scientific growth. The most important functions or dimensions of the human language (which animal languages do not possess) are the descriptive and the argumentative functions. The growth of these functions is, of course, of our making, though they are unintended consequences of our actions. It is only within a language thus enriched that critical argument and knowledge in the objective sense become possible.
The repercussions, or the feedback effects, of the evolution of the third world upon ourselves—our brains, our traditions (if anybody were to start where Adam started, he would not get further than Adam did) our dispositions to act (that is, our beliefs [The theory that beliefs may be gauged by readiness to bet was regarded as well known in 1771 ; see 1778, pg852]) and our actions, can hardly be overrated.
As opposed to all this, traditional epistemology is interested in the second world: in knowledge as a certain kind of belief—justifiable belief, such as belief based upon perception. As a consequence, this kind of belief philosophy cannot explain (and does not even try to explain) the decisive phenomenon that scientists criticize their theories and so kill them. Scientists try to eliminate their false theories, they try to let them die in their stead. The believer—whether animal or man—perishes with his false beliefs. [emphasis in original]
View PDF: