Charles Taylor on Representational Knowledge

[p. 424] In some circles it seems to be rapidly becoming a new orthodoxy that the whole enterprise from Descartes, through Locke and Kant, and pursued by various nineteenth- and twentieth-century succession movements, was a mistake. Within this new agreement, however, what is becoming less and less clear is what exactly it means to overcome the epistemological standpoint [….]

Rorty’s book seems to offer a clear and plausible answer. The heart of the old epistemology was the belief in a foundational enterprise (Princeton, 1979:132). What the positive sciences need to complete [then], on this view, was a rigorous discipline that could check the credentials of all truth claims. An alleged science could only be valid if its findings met this test; otherwise it rested on sand. Epistemology would ultimately make clear just what made knowledge claims valid, and what ultimate degree of validity they could lay claim to. (And, of course, one could come up with a rather pessimistic, skeptical answer to the latter question. […])

In practice, of course, epistemologists took their cue from what they identified as the successful sciences of their day, all the way from Descartes’s infatuation with mathematics to contemporary vogue for reduction to physics. But the actual foundational science was not supposed itself to be dependent on any of the empirical sciences, and this obviously on pain of a circularity that would sacrifice its foundational character. Arguments about the source of valid knowledge claims were not supposed to be empirical.

If we follow this description, then it is clear what overcoming epistemology has to mean. It will mean abandoning foundationalism. On this view, Quine would figure [p. 425] among the prominent leaders of this new philosophical turn, since he proposes to “naturalize” epistemology, that is, deprive it of it’s a priori status and consider it as one science among others, one of many mutually interacting departments of our picture of the world. […]

But there is a wider conception of the epistemological tradition [….] If I had to sum up this understanding in a single formula, it would be that knowledge is to be seen as correct representation of an independent reality. In its original form it saw knowledge as the inner depiction of an outer reality.[1]

The reason why some thinkers prefer to focus on this interpretation, rather than merely on the foundationalist ambitions that are ultimately (as Quine has shown) detachable from it, is that it is bound up with very influential and often not fully articulated notions about science and about the nature of human agency. […]

The link between this representational conception and the new, mechanistic science of the seventeenth century. This is, in fact, twofold. On one side, the mechanization of the world picture undermined the previously dominant understanding of knowledge and thus paved the way for the modern view. The most important traditional view was that of Aristotle, according to which when we come to know something, the mind <nous> becomes one with the object of thought (Cf., e.g., De Anima III, 430a20, also 431a1 and 431b20-23). Of course, this is not to say that they become materially the same thing; rather, the idea is that they are informed by the same <eidos> (Cf., e.g., De Anima III, 430a9 and 431b32). Here was a conception quite different form the representational model, even though some of the things Aristotle said could be construed as supporting this later. The basic bent of Aristotle’s model could much better be described as participational: being informed by the same <eidos>, the mind participated in the being of the known object, rather than simply depicting it.

But this theory totally depends on the philosophy of forms. Once one no longer explains the way things are in terms of the species that inform them, this conception of knowledge is untenable and rapidly becomes close to unintelligible. We have great difficulty in understanding it today. The representational view can easily then appear as the only available alternative.

[… p. 426] If we see [perception] as another process in a mechanistic universe, we cannot but construe it as involving as a crucial component the passive reception of impressions from the external world. Knowledge then hangs on a certain relation holding between what is “out there” and certain inner states that this external reality causes in us. This construal, valid for Locke, applies just as much to the latest AI-inspired models of thinking. It is one of the mainsprings of the epistemological tradition.

The epistemological construal is, then, an understanding of knowledge that fits well with modern mechanistic science. This is one of its great strengths, and certainly this connection contributes to the present vogue of computer-based models of the mind. […] It is in fact heavily overdetermined. […]

[According to Descartes] if the object of my musings happens to coincide with real events in the world, this doesn’t give me knowledge of them. This congruence has to come about through a reliable method, generating well-founded confidence. Science requires certainty, and this can only be based on that undeniable clarity which Descartes called évidence. “Every science is a certain and evident knowledge,” runs the opening sentence of the second of the Rules for the Direction of the Mind.

Now certainty is something that the mind has to generate for itself. It requires a reflexive turn. […] The correct issue of science, that is, of certainty, can be posed—the issue of the correspondence of idea to reality, which Descartes raises and then disposes of through the supposition of the malin genie [evil genius] and the proof of his negation, the veracious God.

The confidence that underlies this whole operation is that certainty is something the thinker can generate for himself, by ordering his thoughts correctly—according to clear and distinct connections. […] The very fact of reflexive clarity is bound to improve our epistemic position, as long as knowledge is understood representationally. […]

[p. 427] Descartes is thus the originator of the modern notion that certainty is the child of reflexive clarity [….]

There is still a strong draw toward distinguishing and mapping the formal operations of our thinking. In certain circles it would seem that an almost boundless confidence is placed in the defining of formal relations as a way of achieving clarity and certainty about our thinking, be it in the (mis)application of rational choice theory to ethical problems or in the great popularity of computer models of the mind [….]

The plausibility of the computer as a model of thinking comes partly from the fact that it is a machine, hence living “proof” that materialism can accommodate explanations in terms of intelligent performance; but partly too from the widespread faith that our intelligent performances are ultimately to be understood in terms of formal operations. The computer, it can be said, is a “syntactic engine.” […] The most perspicuous critics of the runaway enthusiasm with the computer model, such as Hubert Dreyfus, tirelessly point out how implausible it is to understand certain of our intelligent performances in terms of a formal calculus, including our most common everyday ones, such as making our way around our rooms, streets, and gardens, picking up and manipulating the objects we use, and so on. But the great difficulties that computer simulations have encountered in this area don’t seem to have dimmed the enthusiasm of real believers in this model. It is as though they had been vouchsafed some certain revelation a priori that it must all be done by formal calculi. Now this “revelation,” I submit, [p. 428] comes from the depths of our modern culture and the epistemological model that is anchored in it, whose strength is based not just on its affinity to mechanistic science but also on its congruence to the powerful ideal of reflexive, self-given certainty.

  

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Notes:

1. Cf. Descrates’s statement in his letter to Gibieuf of 19 January 1642, where he declares himself “assured that I can have any knowledge of what is outside me, [that] by the mediation [of] key ideas that I have had in me.” […] The notion that the modern epistemological tradition is basically dominated by this understanding of representation was pioneered by Heidegger [….]

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Source: Charles Taylor, "Overcoming Epistemology," in After Philosophy: End or Transformation, ed. Kenneth Baynes, James Bohman, and Thomas McCarthy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), in Twentieth-Century Philosophy, ed. Forrest E. Baird and Walter Kaufmann (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2003), 424-428.